Tag: EXIF

The Date and Time menu item on a Fijufilm X-Pro3

Set Your Camera Clock’s Time

Setting the camera clock time in the Date and Time menu item on a Fijufilm X-Pro3
The times in my cameras weren’t bad this time. They were only off by a couple of minutes. Photo by Carl Seibert

It’s time to “fall back” an hour – again

For most US-based photographers, Sunday, November 1 marked the time to readjust camera clocks at the end of Daylight Saving Time. In most of Europe, the fateful date was last Sunday, October 25. And in most of Asia, countries don’t take part in the twice-yearly festival of clock-changing.

But whether your country does or doesn’t have Daylight Saving Time, it’s a good time to take a look at the date and time settings in all your cameras to make sure everything is on the up and up.

Camera clocks aren’t the greatest timekeepers. I was tempted to compare them unfavorably to Swiss chronometers, but hey, even chronometer-certified timepieces drift over half a year’s time.

My cameras were all a little fast this time, but only by a couple minutes or so. We’ve come a long way from the early digital era, when camera clocks could be super wildly off. But still.

Have I checked my IPTC Create Date lately?

Most of us – and I’m speaking for myself here – never so much as notice whether the times in our Exif metadata are tracking with reality or not. I set Photo Mechanic to set the IPTC Create Date time to the Exif capture time in my files and that’s that. Heck, I don’t even check to make sure the setting hasn’t been bumped in the last, well, since the last time I did one of these posts.

How fine a point you want to put on timekeeping varies with what you shoot, how your workflow is structured, and how you find images in your collection.

At one end of the spectrum, some time last Thursday is close enough. At the other, you might want frames shot on different cameras to sort in minute-by-minute chronological order. If you’re in the latter group, some camera manufacturers offer software that will let you perfectly synchronize cameras. (Sometimes for free and sometimes at fairly outrageous prices, I might add.) Or, if you use Photo Mechanic, you could use the method I describe in this post.

So there you have it. Check those camera clocks. Check the metadata on a picture to make sure the IPTC time and the Exif time are as you want them to be. Then there will be one little annoyance not to worry about for another half a year or so.

Hey. While you’re at it, check those batteries on your smoke detectors, computer UPSes and security gizmos around the house. It couldn’t hurt.  Stay safe out there.

Screenshot of adjusting time in Photo Mechanic

Synchronize your capture times in Photo Mechanic

In most of the US, we have just sprung forward for Daylight Saving Time. 

While we are busily setting the clocks in all our cameras, some of us might wonder if we can synchronize these things so that we can sort images by time. For real. Like frame by frame. Or play by play in a ballgame. 

Well, no. The crappy clocks in cameras just don’t run well enough for that to really work. But we can use Photo Mechanic’s time manipulation feature to sync up multiple cameras after the shoot.

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Screenshot shows number added by Facebook to the Special Instructions field on a photo.

Facebook’s “hidden” metadata codes

A nefarious metadata plot has been unearthed and news of it is streaking around the interwebs. An Australian law student named Edin Jusupovic was casually looking at photos downloaded from Facebook in a hex editor and tweeted about what he saw. 
And from there, as they say, the rest was history. When last I looked, Jusupovic’s tweet had been retweeted 16,637 times, there were nearly 2,000 mostly clueless replies to his thread, and no less a journalistic standard-bearer than Forbes had weighed in: “Facebook Embeds 'Hidden Codes' To Track Who Sees And Shares Your Photos”, cried their headline.

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Illustration on using variables on Photo Mechanic to update copyright year

Photo Mechanic can update copyright year automatically

Have you advanced the year in your copyright notice? As I write this, the new year is a couple of weeks old. That’s about when most photographers start to feel a slight gnawing feeling that maybe there might be something they’ve forgotten.

So, go increment your copyright year while it’s still early enough to pretend that you did it in time for your first assignment of the new year.

Users of Photo Mechanic don’t have to go through this copyright year nonsense. In Photo Mechanic, you can just put a variable in the copyright field in your template. The variable will fill in the copyright year when you apply your template. And you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Ever. Again.

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Screenshot Exif time data, showing a picture of an ibis

Check your camera’s clock

Did you set the time on your camera's clock back from Daylight Saving Time to Standard time this morning?

For those of us who live in the US, at two o'clock this morning time slipped back and we gained (temporarily) an hour of sleep.
Around lunchtime, I somehow remembered that I needed to change the time back on the clocks in my cameras. And I felt good about it in the way that you feel good about doing something that you know you should do religiously, but, well, you aren't quite as diligent as you should be.

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Jeffery Friedl's Image Metadata Viewer

Online metadata viewer survey

You can use web-based tools to view metadata on photos. While I doubt that’s earth-shattering news to any of you, a quick Google search on the subject returns breathless posts. “OMG! There’s metadata! Look! See!.”  Granted, we have a lot of educating to do if we are to improve the environment in which photos must live online, but it’s a bit over the top. Let’s exhale and see what, if any useful resources we can find here.

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Your metadata may be stored in multiple places in your media file. We took a deep dive to find out wh

XMP, IPTC/IIM, or Exif; which is preferred?

Which instance of the IPTC metadata does your favorite application prefer? Inquiring minds want to know.

Let’s step back for a moment for some background. Because all things that should be dead simple usually aren’t, the IPTC metadata -  important information like the caption, your byline, and copyright notice -  is stored in multiple places in your file.

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XnView is a powerful photo browser

XnView metadata How-To

Considering its power and low cost, XnView is a must-have. XnView is a photo browsing/editing/metadata tool. It operates in a files and folders environment, like Photo Mechanic, and unlike Adobe Lightroom. It’s available at a price that suggests that there’s no reason not to have a good tool for working with metadata.

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Screenshot of metadata in text editor

Metadata. What is it?

A mini-glossary post.......Labels. Most definitions of metadata start by saying that "'metadata' literally means 'data about data." In a technical, database-y kind of way, that's exactly true. But for us it's labels. We're talking about behind-the-scenes labels attached to digital content assets.

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