Date for sort in rawtherapee 5.11

paulalan · February 19, 2025, 9:31pm

I am on RT 5.11. This has a option to sort by date. Good so far.

Using powershell, I modified my file date to allow 2 sources of photos to be mixed so that concurrent photos are next to each other. That works fine W-exp sort by date. Also W-exp properties shows the date that I inserted.

But rawtherapee shows the old date, the original creation date of the file.

Is this because I did not reload the image (how do a reload a directory)? or what? I checked ALL dates and they are all correct. Where is rawtherapee getting the date for the file from?

This may be an artifact due to cloud storage. I just used “free up space” to eliminate the local (my computer) copy, and then used “Always keep on my device” to restore a local version. The date is now back to the wrong one. I will try to fix this by moving my files to only local storage, fixing it there, and then moving files back to cloud storage.

I have just opened the directory now stored on my computer, not a cloud drive, and the date/time are STILL those of the original file, not the modified date. Yet, again, I cannot find a date/time in the file which matches the rawtherapee date/time. So, even though I set up the date/time to correctly sync the files, I cannot do so in rawtherapee.

cedric · February 20, 2025, 4:02am

Sounds like RawTherapee only reads one of the several EXIF date/times in the image file, for example:

DateTimeOriginal
CreateDate
ModifyDate

What is “W-exp”?

Lawrence37 · February 21, 2025, 6:36am

The capture time is used if available. The file modification time is a fallback. Specifically, the capture time is pulled from the metadata in this order of precedence:

Exif.Image.DateTimeOriginal
Exif.Photo.DateTimeOriginal
Exif.Photo.DateTimeDigitized
Exif.Image.DateTime
File modified time

Source:

github.com/RawTherapee/RawTherapee

rtengine/imagedata.cc

db575c669


      
          std::string datetime_taken;
          if (find_exif_tag("Exif.Image.DateTimeOriginal")) {
              datetime_taken = pos->print(&exif);
          }
          else if (find_exif_tag("Exif.Photo.DateTimeOriginal")) {
              datetime_taken = pos->print(&exif);
          }
          else if (find_exif_tag("Exif.Photo.DateTimeDigitized")) {
              datetime_taken = pos->print(&exif);
          } else if (find_exif_tag("Exif.Image.DateTime")) {
              datetime_taken = validateUft8(pos->print(&exif));
          }
          if (sscanf(datetime_taken.c_str(), "%d:%d:%d %d:%d:%d", &time.tm_year, &time.tm_mon, &time.tm_mday, &time.tm_hour, &time.tm_min, &time.tm_sec) == 6) {
              time.tm_year -= 1900;
              time.tm_mon -= 1;
              time.tm_isdst = -1;
              timeStamp = mktime(&time);
          }