hpr0546 :: Shot of Hack – Changing the time offset of a series of photos
Hosted by Ken Fallon on 2010-06-03 is flagged as Explicit and is released under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.
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The problem: You have a series of photos where the time is offset from the correct time but is still correct in relation to each other. Here are a few of the times that I’ve needed to do this: - Changing the battery on my camera switched to a default date. - I wanted to synchronize the time on my camera to a GPS track so the photos matched the timestamped coordinates. - At a family event where images from different cameras were added together. You can do edit the timestamp using a GUI and many photo manipulation applications like the GIMP support metadata editing. For example on KDE: gwenview -> plugins -> images -> metadata -> edit EXIF The problem is that this gets tiresome after a few images, and anyway the times are correct in relation to each other – I just need to add or subtract a time correction to them en masse. The answer: exiv2 – Image metadata manipulation tool. It is a program to read and write Exif, IPTC and XMP image metadata and image comments. user@pc:~$ exiv2 *.jpg File name : test.jpg File size : 323818 Bytes MIME type : image/jpeg Image size : 1280 x 960 Camera make : FUJIFILM Camera model : MX-1200 Image timestamp : 2008:12:07 15:12:59 Image number : Exposure time : 1/64 s Aperture : F4.5 Exposure bias : 0 EV Flash : Fired Flash bias : Focal length : 5.8 mm Subject distance: ISO speed : 160 Exposure mode : Auto Metering mode : Multi-segment Macro mode : Image quality : Exif Resolution : 1280 x 960 White balance : Thumbnail : image/jpeg, 5950 Bytes Copyright : Exif comment : The trick is to pick a image where you can that figure out what the time was and work out the time offset. In my case I needed to adjust the date forward by six months and four days while changing the time back by seven hours. I used the command exiv2 -O 6 -D 4 -a -7 *.jpg -a time Time adjustment in the format [-]HH[:MM[:SS]]. This option is only used with the 'adjust' action. Examples: 1 adds one hour, 1:01 adds one hour and one minute, -0:00:30 subtracts 30 seconds. -Y yrs Time adjustment by a positive or negative number of years, for the 'adjust' action. -O mon Time adjustment by a positive or negative number of months, for the 'adjust' action. -D day Time adjustment by a positive or negative number of days, for the 'adjust' action. When we run this we can see that the timestamp has now changed. user@pc:~$ exiv2 *.jpg | grep timestamp Image timestamp : 2009:06:11 08:12:59 That’s it. Remember this is the end of the conversation – to give feedback you can either record a show for the HPR network and email it to admin@hackerpublicradio.org or write it on a post-it note and attach it to the windscreen of Dave Yates’s car as he’s recording his next show. http://www.hackerpublicradio.org http://kenfallon.com/?cat=12