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Author Topic: Changing capture time and other date fields in CR2 and NEF Raw Files  (Read 3244 times)

lawrencelee

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Hi,

In a recent vacation, I set my camera to UTC time to make life easier later down the road if I want to geotag. I did that and now I find myself in a situation where I need to change the capture time and other date fields in the CR2 and NEF files that I got. The problem is that I'm not sure which is the best tool to do this. I've been asking a lot of questions lately, but I'm still not convinced the method is the right one to go. I'm mainly afraid of corrupting the files that I got.

One of the tools that I was told to use is ExifTool. I've contacted the programmer, Phil Harvey, and he was very helpful, but he can't provide any guarantees that his tool will not corrupt the RAW files that I have. Because I have literally thousands of photos, he told me to use the following command line to change the dates (directory will be different obviously)

Quote
exiftool -overwrite_original " -alldates+=8 -ext nef c:\images

Has anyone here used ExifTool to change the date fields in CR2 and NEF files before? What if some of my pictures were taken at 22:00. If I add 8 hours, then clearly that's a new day. Will ExifTool be smart enough to fast forward one day for the pictures that were taken from 14:00 (UTC) and onward?Any comments on the reliability of the program? How many date fields are there in CR2 and NEF files? I got the impression from Phil that CR2 and NEF files have the exact 3 date fields. I need to change it all to as if I set the date and time correctly in the first place. Does anyone here understand exactly what I want to do?

I realize that LR2 can change the capture dates, but I'm currently in the middle of organizing my files. My goal is to fix the date problems of the CR2 and NEF files, then convert and embed the originals to DNGs, before I catalog them with LR2. One last thing and that is I don't want to create any XMP sidecar files! I can't stress that enough. I'm sure the whole XMP sidecar pros and cons have been debated to death and I don't want to get into it. One of the reasons why I want to go down the road of using DNS is because I don't have to deal with sidecar files. I want to permanately change the date fields of my RAW files in a standard compliant way without corrupting the Raw files. What this ultimately means is that regardless of which program I use, the correct time and date will be displayed. I hope everyone here understands the point of my post and help me resolve my problem. Thx!
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RobertMichael

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Changing capture time and other date fields in CR2 and NEF Raw Files
« Reply #1 on: March 11, 2010, 02:12:23 am »

I would not expect him to give such a guarantee, no software maker would. But you can get certainty by working on copies of your files.

There are several programmes with a GUI that use ExifTool
First of all, there is ExifTooolGui http://freeweb.siol.net/hrastni3/foto/exif/exiftoolgui.htm which is what the name says it is.

Then there is Geosetter http://www.geosetter.de/en/
which is mainly for geotagging using data from a GPS, but it is easy to edit the time fields.

I use the latter, and so far have not encountered any corrupt files (CRW, CR2 and DNG). With the CRW and CR2 files changes are [if I remember correctly] written to the xmp file.
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