Time shifting photos the easy way

This summer, we snapped about 500 photos during our move from Minnesota to San Diego. Unfortunately, the time setting in the camera we were using was 16 hours slow for some reason, meaning that the time data stamped into the EXIF tags of the photos were also off by 16 hours.

Faced with the daunting task of manually adjusting that many photos, I paid a visit to the google and found these awesome EXIF tools from Phil Harvey.

I was about to dust off the old perl skills to write a script to recurse through the image directory and adjust all the timestamps by 16 hours, when I saw that my new good buddy Phil had done it already(!)

Pop open a shell and enter:

exiftool "-DateTimeOriginal+=0:0:0 16:0:0" dirname

where dirname is the directory that contains all the photos with timestamps to be adjusted.

Tool had no issues recognizing Nikon raw files and doing the right thing. No fuss, no muss, no more excuse to not fix timestamps when you forget to adjust your camera's time after day light savings time (yes, we're still using a digital camera from 2000(!) that doesn't automatically adjust for these things)

If you do anything with large numbers of digital photos, ExifTool is a must have for your digital toolkit