Need help changing EXIF date

Hi there, I am trying to change the creation date of a photo in digiKam but when I click on ‘apply’ that date turns back again to its original value. I am trying with Item->Edit metadata->Date&Time. Thanks!

Edit: It seems to work only for jpegs.

Hi @geldo,

What file type do you work on?

It seems to function OK if I change the date of a tiff, but not of a raf, for instance.

Sincerely,

Claes in Lund, Sweden

Hi @Claes,
I need to change some DNGs.

Might this help you?

Have fun!

Claes in Lund, Sweden

Many thanks!

Oh well… I just found that I also need to change the file creation date (digiKam search engine uses that date I think). Is it possible on Windows 10?

Hi @geldo

Yes, it can be done with Powershell.

$file = get-item "c:\users\me\pictures\photo.dng"
$newdate = get-date "01/01/1990"
$file.CreationTime = $newdate

I am 99% sure digiKam does not care about file creation date at all. Firstly the relevant date for photographs is in exif and secondly, creation date is a windows only thing, while digikam is cross-platform (well linux, ported to mac and windows).

Hi @james, thank you that is very interesting, but it doesn’t seem to work for me… I run your example in powershell, got no message but the file date in the dir command isn’t changed… I am quite sure I made a mistake somewhere, I will try again tomorrow.

Hi @rasimo, it may well be as you say, but then there are at least two exif creation dates for each photo since I modified one of them to no result :slight_smile: of course I will try again tomorrow as it is around midnight here…

If you already had the folder open in File Explorer, then you will have to hit refresh to see the change.
This method definitely works, and no need to be admin etc, so do try again. Here I now have a file that was modified in September before it will have been created this coming Friday :smile:

Done! Thank you all…

…and a few things I have learned:

  1. No need to change the file creation date (the Powershell method works very well anyway)
  2. In digiKam there are two ways to modify the time stamp of one or more photos: via the edit of metadata for each photo, or via the batch queue manager for a group of photos
  3. In any case you must tell digiKam that you let him write metadata into raw files (you need to change settings)
  4. If you choose to edit each image manually, you then have to tell digiKam to reread each image metadata

Have a nice day!

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About point 3:
In 5.8.0 you can’t do that anymore: There were several (reproducible) reports of corrupted RAW files when writing metadata. Therefore writing to metadata for RAW files is disabled, you need to use sidecars for those (or external tools, like exiftool, which never corrupted anything for me).

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I have the 5.7.0 and the job done for now, but it is good to know…