Apply EXIF dateCreated data to existing photos

Question

I'm helping a relative set up a new computer. They've imported all of their photos from the old system to Windows Live Photo Gallery on the new system (running Windows 7), and want the photo's created date to display on the photo (like on their old film-based camera). I've seen tools that can do this one at a time, but this person has over 1000 photos, so I'm looking for a utility that can apply a nice datetime stamp in the corner of the photo in batch mode. I could write code for this, but I was hoping for a faster solution.

(I know that the new digital camera can do this automatically and I have configured that, but I still need to fix the existing photos)

Answer 1

You could use Exiftool

Date/Time Shift Feature

Have you ever forgotten to set the date/time on your digital camera before taking a bunch of pictures? ExifTool has a time shift feature that makes it easy to apply a batch fix to the timestamps of the images (ie. change the "Date Picture Taken" reported by Windows Explorer).

Say for example that your camera clock was reset to 2000:01:01 00:00:00 when you put in a new battery at 2005:11:03 10:48:00. Then all of the pictures you took subsequently have timestamps that are wrong by 5 years, 10 months, 2 days, 10 hours and 48 minutes. To fix this, put all of the images in the same directory ("DIR") and run exiftool:

exiftool "-DateTimeOriginal+=5:10:2 10:48:0" DIR

The example above changes only the DateTimeOriginal tag, but any writable date or time tag can be shifted, and multiple tags may be written with a single command line. Commonly, in JPEG images, the DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate and ModifyDate values must all be changed. For convenience, a shortcut tag called AllDates has been defined to represent these three tags. So, for example, if you forgot to set your camera clock back 1 hour at the end of daylight savings time in the fall, you can fix the images with:

exiftool -AllDates-=1 DIR