Joshua posted on the feature request forum earlier this week, asking for a new feature that could “adjust the time for [a group of photos] down to the minute and second instead of just the hour.”
The good news is Lightroom can already do that! The wording in the Edit Capture Time dialog does make it sound like it will set all of the selected photos to the same date and time, but don’t worry, it’s smarter than that.
The ‘Adjust to a specified date and time’ option adjusts the active photo (the one in the thumbnail) to the time you choose, and adjusts any other selected photos by the same increment.
Let’s try an example. (If you haven’t used Edit Capture Time before, you’ll find more detailed instructions here.) Imagine you have 3 photos selected. The middle one (photo 2) is the active photo, surrounded by the lightest grey border, and displayed as the thumbnail in the Edit Capture Time dialog. That photo is currently set to 12:14, shown in the Original Time field, but you know that it should have been set to 16:26, so you update the Corrected Time field. When you press Change, the other selected photos will also have 2 hours and 12 minutes added on to their individual capture times, with the resulting capture times shown in the dialog below.
The same principles can be applied for changes in Daylight Savings Time or time zone adjustments, although the ‘Shift by a set number of hours’ option is easier if you’re moving by whole hours.
In many parts of the world, Daylight Saving Time ended within the last couple of weeks. Have you remembered to update the clock on your camera yet?
Is there any way to get LR to actually adjust all selected photos to the same specified date and time? I am dealing with a lot of scanned images, some of prints, some of slides. In many instances, I have multiple images that I know were shot on the same date. However, the date that is on the scans are not the same. I have often selected a group of images and thought I was adjusting all to the same date. However, that is not what happens. Sometimes the images are different version of the same original. Heaven knows where the date/time has come from that LR is finding as the “date”. So, what happens is I adjust the date on one of the group that should all have the same date, and the other versions get adjusted to some date/time that has nothing to do with the actual capture time. Is there a way to do this? Or do I have to adjust each image individually if LR thinks they have different dates to start with?
Not within Lightroom, but there’s a plugin that will. John Beardsworth’s CaptureTime to Exif plug-in uses Exiftool to add your chosen date to TIFF, PSD, JPEG or DNG files. You can download it from https://www. Lrq.me/beardsworth-capturetimetoexif
Fantastic post! Thanks. The wording, “Adjust to a specified date and time” certainly implies that all photos will be set to that time, not that they’ll be adjusted by that offset.
OK, I’m late to the game but i have a similar but different issue. Windows somehow stripped the original time of a set of images in a folder and they all have the same date and time. Now, I am not worried about the specific time (or even the exact date) so much, but each picture should have a different timestamp for many reasons. The above will adjust all the photos the same which will still leave me with photos having identical timestamps.
What I need is something that will increase the delta by a value as its applied to each photo. Can Lightroom do that?
Lightroom itself can’t, but the Capture Time to EXIF plug-in can http://www.beardsworth.co.uk/lightroom/capture-time-to-exif/
Great suggestion to help people work with time changes. The example of time change was where we have 3 images so, we selected the middle one. If, we have 11 images and select 3 image {which is not middle for 11} and perform the same steps. Will this suggestion case an affect on all images? 1st, 2nd and 4th till 11th?
Yep, it doesn’t matter which one is the active photos or how many photos are selected overall – they’ll all be updated incrementally.
thanks Victoria!!
helpful info
Thanks for this post – I was pretty sure things were like that (relative adjusting for multiple photos), but as you say, the wording is a little confusing and I googled to make sure before making a test.
Again, thanks.
Funny: this was the first question that I asked on some LR forum years ago. It was Victoria who answered, by referring to a page in her ‘Missing FAQ’ book, which I subsequently bought. SInce then, of all the LR books I’ve bought or browsed, it’s the only one that I still use frequently.
That’s wonderful to hear, thanks so much Peter!
Oh, how i loved this option recently. Some people delivered pictures from camera’s that hadn’t been time-adjusted for a while (think 2007). So the whole sequence of the event was gone. With LR it was a matter of mintues to correct it.
Wow, 2007! It’s bailed me out when I’ve forgotten to update for DST too.
Yeah. I guess they took the camera out of some closet, put a battey in, and took some pictures 🙂 But the pictures where important for the event, (cycling around the Netherlands for charity) So I decided to use them because they we’re important for the sequence of the event. Setting DST is in my routine for quite a while now 🙂
Hi Vic,
Thanx for that tip. Never tried this way. Always used exiftool for this.
Excellent, you should find this much easier and quicker then.
But this didnt work when I have photos form two diffrent cammeras in one catalog. I want to change time only from one and time shif for both…
It does, you just have to filter for one camera at a time using the Metadata Filters.
I treid that and… nope, dosn’t work for me. Also pictures of second camera, which I hided after filter with meta, saves time shift. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong.
Ok, walk me through exactly what you’re doing, step by step.