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Author Topic: Unexpected Happy Action When Editing Capture Time of Scanned Slides  (Read 727 times)

bobmetzler

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I've been working with scans of slides (Provia) from a trip to Burma in January 2003, my last major use of film before buying a Canon 10D in June 2003.  I was aware from George Jardine's excellent LR4 Library tutorial that the Edit Capture Time feature enabled offsetting the capture time of images by an integral number of hours, making it easy to recover from forgetting to set the camera time at the start of a trip. 

Somewhere I got the tip that the Edit Capture Time feature could also be used to enter the correct (or credible, anyway) capture date and time into metadata of files scanned from film.  My 40,000 slides are numbered sequentially in the format YYYYMM0001, YYYYMM0002, etc.  Within each month, I simply numbered them in chronological order since I didn't keep shot-by-shot records.

So, I selected a group of film scan images that I knew were shot starting on a specific date.  Using the Edit Capture Time dialog with the "Adjust to a specified date and time" button selected, I typed in the date and an arbitrary, but credible, time.  What I expected was for all the selected images to be set to this same exact same date and time.  I figured that this would at least put the date I wanted in each file; I thought that I would then need to manually enter times, probably at about one minute intervals, in the metadata of each file.  I was startled to find that Lightroom had used my entered date but had spread the times out by one or two minute increments.  How could this be?

I finally realized that my Nikon LS5000 slide scanner was generating metadata including the time of each scan.  Lightroom's Edit Capture Time feature was then using my manually-entered date and time on the first (focus) image of the selected bunch as the starting date and time, then advancing each image's time via data from the Nikon to create unique capture times, in the correct chronological sequence (assuming that I had scanned the slides in the correct chronological sequence).  What a time saver!

Clearly, this only works if the slides are scanned in chronological order.  If I took a break from scanning slides and picked it up a day or two later, that created a discontinuity in the edited capture time and I needed to make a manual entry with the correct date following the discontinuity.  I also sometimes select another group and enter a new date when I can tell from my wife's trip journal, or the images themselves, that the next group were from another day.
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