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Editing Capture Date and Time

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Mar 20, 2009
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State College, PA
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LR apparently is structured to meet the needs of professional photographers and unfortunately ignores the needs of amateurs who are scanning in old family photos.

When scanning photos sometimes you only know the year, sometimes the month and year, sometimes the day but rarely the time. In LR you have to edit the capture time one image at a time which can be awhile if you have many images to date. If all the images were scanned the same day LR will change them all to the capture date but assign a time based upon when they were scanned. If they were scanned on different days over the span of a days or weeks, many of the images will have different capture dates and only those scanned on the day of the first image will be correct.

I had a solution which suddenly has stopped working and I'd like suggestions as to why.

My solution was to import the images into Elements, and change the date there. Element will allow you to say the day and time are unknown. Then I would remove the images from the LR catalog (do not delete from drive) and import them back again. Voila, problem solved. LR would give all the images the same date and set the unknown time to 12:00:00 AM.

Now this appears to no longer work and I wonder why. When I look at the image in Elements it has the date I entered which may be decades ago. The same image imported to LR has the date the image was scanned. Obviously the date entered into Elements is in the file somewhere, but LR will not show it on the thumbnails. LR now shows the time scanned while it use to show the same time as shown in Elements.
 
I've just started scanning in many thousands of family negatives, so I understand the problem.

I'm not sure why Elements time isn't working for you now - has anything changed on your system? Any updates perhaps?

I may have a quicker solution for you. Have a look at John Beardsworth's CaptureTimeToExif plug-in http://www.photographers-toolbox.com/products/jbeardsworth/jbcapturetimetoexif/
 
We had a similar discussion a while back. What many of us seems to do with unknown times/dates is to assign them to the "first":

- unknown month/date/time will be filed as january 1st 00:00:00
- unknown date/time will be filed as correct month 1st 00:00:00
- unknown time will be filed as correct month and day 00:00:00
 
We had a similar discussion a while back. What many of us seems to do with unknown times/dates is to assign them to the "first":

- unknown month/date/time will be filed as january 1st 00:00:00
- unknown date/time will be filed as correct month 1st 00:00:00
- unknown time will be filed as correct month and day 00:00:00


This is what I do, but while Elements lets you do this to a batch of images, LR requires you to do it one image at a time. Very time consuming.
 
This is what I do, but while Elements lets you do this to a batch of images, LR requires you to do it one image at a time. Very time consuming.

That doesn't sound right. You should be able to select multiple photos and adjust their time. I don't have LR where I am right now though. But I know for sure that I often adjust the time for multiple photos, though I adjust for a wrongly set clock so that all photos get their time adjusted by the same amount + or -. But surely there must be a way of setting one specific time for multiple photos?
 
Yes there is Robert.....but it's probably the usual issue, to apply to multiple images at once they have to be mutli-selected in the Grid, i.e. if Loupe is active and you multi-select in the filmstrip, only the single image in the Loupe gets changed. Select them all in the Grid and no problem.....
 
Yes there is Robert.....but it's probably the usual issue, to apply to multiple images at once they have to be mutli-selected in the Grid, i.e. if Loupe is active and you multi-select in the filmstrip, only the single image in the Loupe gets changed. Select them all in the Grid and no problem.....

They all get changed, but not to the same time. The time is set relative to the time of the first image. This is similar to the time zone adjustment.
 
Still no one has responded to the main problem as to why the date/ time in LR is not the one displayed in Elements. Before last week they were the same. Something got changed in one of these programs and I'd like to know what.
 
Just tried it, no problems:

Edit time in PSE9 (version: fixed date, unknown time)
Read metadate from file in LR4 (not delete + import)
New date (without time) in LR

Greetings from Vienna
Franz
 
They all get changed, but not to the same time. The time is set relative to the time of the first image. This is similar to the time zone adjustment.

You are indeed right. I just tried it myself, and there seems to be no way to set multiple photos to the same time. Strange.
 
Still no one has responded to the main problem as to why the date/ time in LR is not the one displayed in Elements. Before last week they were the same. Something got changed in one of these programs and I'd like to know what.

So what's changed on your system in the last week? Have you run any updates?
 
I made the suggestion to LR to change this more than a year ago. They apparently don't think those of us scanning images are worth much effort.
 
They have a HUGE number of feature requests, and everyone sees their own as most important (quite understandably!). LR's primarily targeted at managing digital photographs, and the majority of its userbase aren't scanning, so I'm sure they take that into account when weighing up requests. There's just a limited number of hours in the day. I hope they'll get to it one day. In the meantime, why not try that plug-in I linked to above. That's what I'll be using.

As far as figuring out what happened to Elements, comparing the metadata from a batch that worked and a batch that didn't might offer some clues.
 
They have a HUGE number of feature requests, and everyone sees their own as most important (quite understandably!). LR's primarily targeted at managing digital photographs, and the majority of its userbase aren't scanning, so I'm sure they take that into account when weighing up requests. There's just a limited number of hours in the day. I hope they'll get to it one day. In the meantime, why not try that plug-in I linked to above. That's what I'll be using.

As far as figuring out what happened to Elements, comparing the metadata from a batch that worked and a batch that didn't might offer some clues.

I have installed the plug in and it does work as you said. Thank you.
 
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