Exiftool Commands to Change Dates on Batch Photos

As a photographer, you know how frustrating it can be when your camera's internal clock gets out of sync. This happened to me recently during an overseas trip, where I forgot to reconfigure my camera to the local time zone. As a result, all the photos I took had incorrect dates and times embedded in their EXIF data. To correct this issue, I turned to Exiftool, a powerful command line tool written in Perl.

To get started with Exiftool, you'll need to download it from the official website. I downloaded Image-ExifTool-8.61.tar.gz and followed the instructions on Installing ExifTool on Unix Platforms. If you're new to Exiftool, be sure to check out the full documentation on ExifTool by Phil Harvey.

Once installed, I needed a way to correct the date and time in all my photos at once. For example, one photo was taken on August 4th, 2011 at 9:19 AM local time, but the EXIF data in the JPEG file indicated July 25th, 2011 at 2:19 AM. I ended up with a large number of photos with incorrect dates and times, all thanks to my camera's internal clock getting out of sync.

Fortunately, Exiftool made it easy to batch correct these dates and times. With its powerful command line interface, I was able to quickly and easily update the metadata for all my photos. Here are some examples of the commands I used:

These commands allowed me to set the date and time in each photo to the correct value, ensuring that my entire collection of photos had accurate EXIF data.

In conclusion, if you find yourself with a large number of photos containing incorrect dates and times due to your camera's internal clock getting out of sync, Exiftool is an excellent tool to use. With its powerful command line interface and ability to batch correct metadata, it can save you hours of time and frustration.

Exiftool commands to change dates on batch photos