Can I change the date on my pictures in the camera?

Question

I recently took about 600 pictures and somehow I have the year wrong on every picture. Can I change the date? I have the Nikon D60 SLR and I went to Russia, Germany, Holland and a few other countries, so I had to change the time a lot. I guess that's how I made the mistake. Help!

Answer 1

Take Menu

You have settings. Time and date.

Change the date or year or month there.

Even you can have manual file names too. :-)

Answer 2

I'm assuming you mean the time that appears in the exif metadata that's included in your image files (not a date that's actually visible in the image itself or something like that).

You need to edit the exif data. There are a number of programs that can do this, including (in the case of the date) Photoshop Elements. Another one that's free and fairly nice is PhotoME (www.photome.de).

HOWEVER, what these generally lack is the ability to do any sort of batch processing. Doing 600 photos one-by-one would be almost unbelievably tedious.

What I'd use is the most basic (but also the most powerful) exif editor: exiftool. You can download it for free at: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exif...

You want to download the executable file (Windows or Mac, as the case may be), not the Perl library (unless you're a computer programmer).

The only tricky thing about the software (which may or may not be tricky for you) is that it has no user interface, but runs on the command line.

It's quite flexible in how it might be used in your case. For example, you could advance the "date taken" year of all the photos in a directory with the following command:

exiftool "-DateTimeOriginal+=1:0:0 0" -overwrite_original *.*

There is a pretty complete explanation of the syntax for shifting dates at:

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exif...

(Look under "Date/Time Shift Feature"), and:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Image-ExifTo...