Photo Exif data
 

Whilst using these strange times to go through my photo collection and sort it all into years and categories etc, I have come across a few folders and the photos within have a photo date of 1979 when checking the information tab on each photo. The majority were taken in the last decade, so obviously somewhere along the way something has happened. Would anyone know what that might be and is there an easy way of getting the photo's creation date back to what it should be ? I'm batch renaming the photos and it runs by date, oldest to newest, so this mucks up the flow so to say.

The 'wrong' date is 31st December 1979 some 33 years off the general date of the offending photos/folders.

Any help appreciated.

The FAT file system uses a date system that starts from 1 January 1980, the fact that your files are showing as 31/12/1979 suggests that they have a date stamp of null or zero i.e. no date information available. Dependant upon the file there may or may not be some more information available in the file metadata. Try right clicking on the file select "Properties" then select the "Details" tab, there might be some information about when the photo was taken there.

Use Irfanview (free) and it's powerful batch handling abilities to sort the dates out.

https://www.irfanview.com/

Mac

I use “A Better Finder Attributes” from publicspace.net.

What you may be seeing is the Created or Modified date - these are the two commonly displayed in Finder/Explorer.

ABFA will display Created, Modified & Exif data. The operation to fix these files is to “Copy EXIF Timestamp to Created/Modified”.

The app is also useful if you use multiple cameras, or the time-zone is incorrect. The values can be skewed by minutes, hours or any required value.

Not sure if this is a Mac only app.

Good luck.

Thanks for the replies chaps. I'm on a Mac, so the Better Finder is probably the way to go. I've been using their Renamer app on and off since a few years and have been very happy with it's simple efficiency.

I'm still none the wiser how the EXIF data on the photos changed from their original though, my technical knowledge wouldn't have allowed me to knowingly muck around with the inner workings.

Don't know the MAC, but EXIF data shouldn't been affected from bugs/events from the Computer Operating System and the storage file system. So that looks like a Picture Management Tool had some unwelcomed effect.

In this case no picture management tool was involved, but along the way something happened.

By chance, another conundrum. I downloaded all my iPhone photos onto an external HD last October to free up space on my phone to take further photos. On looking at them recently, they all have the exif date of 5th October 2019, which must have been the date I transferred then to the external HD. Before this they were all in a normal date/time order. I did nothing knowingly, yet now they're all the same date! Anyone have any ideas ?

Windows guy here, so may just be a tangent... when copied to the external drive, the 'created date' would be the date each file on the drive was created (5 Oct), but the 'last modified date' should retain the original date(s). Which date is being displayed, I wonder?

Looks like the Apple platform is different. Windows takes care of the external info of a file and works with those - like the ones you mentioned. EXIF data created by a camera are treated as payload data and left alone by Windows. IIRC Windows can display them but not change them. You need authoring software for this.

On Apple, EXIF data is to be manipulated? Without user consent? iphone copy to external HDD manipulates EXIF timestamps "photo taken at ..."?? Hard to believe. I don't know if SpringHeeledJack is trapped in this now, but good to know for future. And worth a thought if "Backup" handles dates differently from "move" or "copy".

Thanks for the replies gents. The 'created' and 'modified' dates are exactly the same, so they've been changed along the way it would seem...

The only other thing I can think of, and it's heavily manual, is Jeffrey's image metadata viewer (google that - should be the first link). Shows all available data for an image (web or local). Site is heavily into capchas, though!