Shifting a Picture’s Time

• See All Tutorials

What's wrong with this picture?

Have you ever forgotten to set the right time in your camera? Everybody has...

Changes to and from daylight savings time and travel among time zones make this kind of mistake easy to make. When a camera runs out of battery power, its clock can also reset—especially in older models. When this happens, the camera records the wrong time in the picture information (EXIF metadata).

Why is the Picture Taken time so important?

If you are ever examining a photo long after you took it and you want to learn when exactly the event shown occurred, there is no simpler way than looking at the photo's Picture Taken information. It is also handy during archiving. A common part of archiving is sorting pictures by when they were taken, and Picture Taken time/date information must be correct for this to work well. When assigning GPS data to photos, even a second's difference between the time in the GPS device and your camera time can be important.

Check your camera clock's accuracy often.

How can you change the Picture Taken time for batches of pictures easily in
Zoner Photo Studio 13

In the Browser, select all the the photos whose Picture Taken time you want to shift. Use the Information menu's Batch Edit EXIF command (Ctrl+K). Activate the the Date and Time tab. (You can activate a tab here by checkmarking the checkbox next to its tab name. Tab names are at the top of the window.) At the bottom of the window, checkmark Shift time and set the amount of time shift. If you need to shift the time backwards, use Shift back. After you click Apply, the Picture Taken time in all selected photo files will shift.

Be careful! Before using the Batch Edit EXIF command, make sure that you have not activated one of the other tabs and used unwanted settings in them. (For example, activating Basic Information and its Description field, and then leaving Description empty, will erase your existing descriptions.)

The Batch Edit EXIF function can do a lot more than just shift time. You can also use it to batch-assign ratings to photos, to add text information like titles, descriptions, author, etc., and more. This can save you a lot of time when you later go to organize and archive your photos.

To shift picture times, you need to have installed Zoner Photo Studio 13. If you do not have it yet, you can download it here.

Already with us?

Get your upgrade for a special price here.

• Any comments, questions discuss here.