Skip to main content

⚠️ Please note that this topic or post has been archived. The information contained here may no longer be accurate or up-to-date. ⚠️

Sorting by time

Paul Lunnon
Hi
Need an urgent solution to the following:
Two photographers working an event both cameras clocks checked need to sort files in select folder by time to merge them so that I can select the best of our pictures. Sorting by date sorts one photographers work in date order with he others below in date/time order the two do not merge. Have you any ideas.
Hoping somebody has some ideas.
Many thanks Paul
0

Comments

6 comments

Date Votes
  • SFA
    It sounds like the cameras may be using different date formats or that one is not recording hours minutes and seconds to the same degree of accuracy as the other.

    Have you compared the the dates in the matedata?

    I assume you are sorting in C1 and that C1 uses the Date data from the Basic section of the meta data.

    Of course my assumption could be wrong ...

    I suppose it would be possible to alter the dates and times but, if one camera does not have the times (for example) that may be no help.

    If you still have the original memory cards (or dumped the contents to a hard drive) the irignal files may have retainedtheir creations dates which, presumably, are about as accurate as you will get. That might give you a route to sorting the images at the operating system level. I'm not sure where it will leave you in terms of displaying them in the same order in C1.

    HTH in some way.


    Grant Perkins
    0
  • Paul Lunnon
    Hi Grant
    Many thanks for your quick response have checked metadata for the two cameras (Nikon D200 &D300) yes date/time format ok on both. One (mine) is still in 2011. Never looked at that as we thought time had been the problem before. Just checked last years work and it appears the date got changed mid year heaven knows how. Will now have to find a Meta data editor and change the year on all my images.
    Yet another lesson learnt on the road to photography.
    Many thanks
    Paul
    0
  • SFA
    Playing with the EXIF info is not something to be taken lightly.

    Microsoft Pro Photo Tools has a facility fo change date and time info by an offset number of days but only up to 99 days at a time. Plus the version I downloaded a while back looked sort of half complete and has not been updated for about 2 years.

    That said the method of change would be good for a batch if it allowed +/- x years for example.

    I guess you could run the change multiple times until you work back to the yearand date you require but I'm not sure I would recommend it without doing a lot of testing! (And having at least 2 secured backup sets of the images ....)

    Opanda PowerExif seems to have the facility to edit the relevant part of all the dates in the EXIF for one file and then apply the edit to a range of selected files in batch mode HOWEVER it's not an offset adjustment as far as I can see so I doubt that the batch update would work well for your requirements. Plus from what I can tell it doesn't cater for RAW files if that's what you have.

    It's about 2 years since I last looked for Exif editors. There may be some new versions or new products out there that I missed last time around. There are certainly others that I have not investigated at all.

    It would be quite easy to make the change in a batch using an external editor but that would require the update to be applied in a batch at 1 to 1 relationship and I suspect that most batch updates are intended for 1 (Revised input set) to many (files).

    Do let us know what you find.

    Grant Perkins
    0
  • Coach
    This should work:

    http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
    0
  • Paul Lunnon
    Hi all
    Many thanks for your help. I found that if I right clicked the NEF file in Windows Explore and chose properties then chose details I was able to change the year one by one luckily there were only 74 to do didn't take to long and I now can merge the pics from the two cameras perfectly in time sync.
    Many thanks for your help.

    Paul (UK)
    0
  • SFA
    Hi Paul,

    For 74 that is a practical solution. I thought from your first post you might be looking at hundreds or even thousands!

    😊
    0

Post is closed for comments.