This is a nice feature, but I still prefer to make backups before editing my photos.ĮxifTool changes the metadata in the JPEG file itself. If the metadata editing goes wrong, you can restore from these backups. You’ll find the backups in the same directory as the originals, with an _original extension. That’s because it makes a backup copy of every file before changing the metadata. There are some shortcuts you can use if you just need to adjust the hour value-after a vacation in a different time zone, for example, or a shift to/from Daylight Saving Time.Ĭonsidering how little it seems to be doing, ExifTool runs rather slowly.

The time shift is in the format years:months:days hours:minutes:seconds This adds ( +=) one year to all the date values ( -AllDates) in the metadata for every. With exiftool installed, navigate to the directory where your mistakenly-dated photos are and execute exiftool '-AllDates+=1:0:0 0:0:0' *.JPG There’s probably nothing wrong with the standard installation this is just my preference. Which moved exiftool to a more suitable directory. After following Harvey’s instructions, I also did sudo mv /usr/bin/exiftool /usr/local/bin/ One thing I didn’t like about the installation was that it put the exiftool command-line program in /usr/bin, which I think should be reserved for Apple-supplied programs. I chose 1 the Unix installation so I’d have standard access to the libraries if I wanted to write my own programs. Mac users can install ExifTool using either the Mac instructions (which install from a package) or the Unix instructions (which install through a Makefile). ExifTool is a Perl library with a command-line application that can do all kinds of reporting and surgery on the metadata in your image files.

The first thing to do is download and install Phil Harvey’s extensive ExifTool system. So now you have a bunch of photos with screwed-up metadata. Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that when you got that new camera shortly after the first of the year, you mistakenly set its clock to the year 2008 instead of 2009. Next post Previous post Fixing photo dates

How to run exiftool by phil harvey