I had a rare photography day out today, wandering around a local city with a friend, shooting local landmarks. Great fun, and lots of decent images.
I was using three different cameras, and I’ve imported everything into Lightroom to start going through it, picking the good shots and editing them up. I want to sort them chronologically, regardless of which camera they were taken on. No problem, Lightroom can do that. But… problem… the sort isn’t working properly, with images appearing out of sequence.
I eventually worked out that for some reason, the time set on one of the three cameras is an hour out - a photo taken at 1200 hours is timestamped 1300 hours. Lightroom is sorting correctly, based on the incorrect “capture time” metadata embedded in the files from that one camera.
Now that I’ve downloaded these photos and imported them into Lightroom, I could probably live with this, but if there’s an easyish fix I’d like to know about it - is there a way I can run through those image files (Fuji RAF) subtracting an hour from the capture time data? Happily, I put the files from each camera into their own directory, so the batch would be self contained - every file in one folder.
I assume that if I can somehow bulk change them, I’d need to reimport into Lightroom to have it pick up the correct timestamps?
I’m not in front of a computer now, but Lightroom has an Edit Capture Time that will do what I think you want. I use it all the time to sync images from two cameras together when I forget to sync beforehand.
Oh, I should add, there’s a couple options: you can shift by a certain amount, or you can shift to a time, and it will alter all the other selected ones accordingly. What I often do is take a picture of time.gov at the end of a shoot on each body and then select that photo after filtering by camera body, hit select all, and sync to that time. Repeat for the other bodies. When I work with other photographers for the same shoot, I just ask them to take a pic of time.gov at some point and we sync all our bodies together that way.
…yeah, this was a pretty normal part of my workflow. This link works you through it step-by-step.
How To Sync Multiple Camera Time Stamps In Lightroom 4.
The key is to " Find Images You Know Were Taken At The Same Time." If you can’t find an exact set of images that were taken at the same time, you have to do a bit of guesswork, but you can usually get it close enough.
Awesome, thanks @pulykamell and @Banquet_Bear - I’ll get reading.
Interesting. Nothing’s more annoying than trying to sort holiday pics and finding I forgot to set the time
on the camera to the new time zone - particularly when you go halfway around the world and half the day’s pics are tagged the evening before, since I like to sort to folders by days.
(The only thing worse is discovering you accidentally switched to RAW when adjusting the settings. Why aren’t half my pictures showing in the album program? Oh, because they’re not a compatible format… I also had the same problem with the iPhone, where it assumes you want to take photos in a format nobody else really uses.)
Quick update - the instructions linked to by @Banquet_Bear worked. 
It wasn’t quite perfect. After further checking, the exact time difference was 52 minutes. In the Edit Capture Time menu, Lightroom offers the choice of:
- Adjust to a specified date and time
- Shift by a set number of hours (time zone adjust)
- Change to a file’s creation date
Option 1 would have to be done one image at a time, since I’d need to set each one to a different absolute time (and work out what the capture time - 52 minutes for each image as well.
Option 2 only allows changing by exact hour increments, but can be applied to all the images at once.
Option 3 doesn’t apply in this scenario since I do want the capture time, not the time the file on disk was created.
I went for option 2 in the end, set to an hour. Not exactly right, but near enough that the pics are close to the right order now.
Thanks all, I learned something!
No it doesn’t have to be one image at a time. Click on the image whose time you want to change, then select-all (your first image will still be chosen), then adjust that one to the time you want and all others will be changed appropriately. That’s how I do the time.gov sync. I select that image, then all, then set the capture time to what is on the time.gov picture, and voila.
You just need to have one image whose date and time you know and can sync everything to that. In the absence of such a reference point, I look for two images that were taken at the same time or almost so (when working with multiple photographers) and sync all cameras to the time on one of those cameras, and the rest fall into place. Or, if i am shooting with two bodies at the same time and know that I switched from the 70-200 to the 24-70 as the bride walked down the aisle, I can add a second or two to the last 70-200 image and use that as the time to sync the first 24-70 image (and the rest of images on that body).
Ahhhh. Gotcha - light bulb moment.
I (wrongly) thought that if I select-all and changed the capture time, then it would set them all the selected images to the same capture time. Clearly it’s cleverer than that.
I’m actually OK with how it ended up, but presumably if I wanted better accuracy I could still, even now, take a shot of time.gov, import it into the catalogue, and follow your workflow?
Thanks @pulykamell
I have used exiftime on Linux to do the same thing.