Did you forget to change the daylight savings time of your camera? Did you let someone else borrow your camera and mess up the internal clock? Or does your camera not properly keep track of the time anymore? Whatever the reason may be, this script lets you quickly adjust the EXIF timestamps of an image or a directory of images.
This script works by checking the MIMETypes of an image and verifying whether we're dealing with an image (as the number of file extensions indicating (RAW) images is too large and continuously changing). By checking MIMETypes and changing EXIF data, this works on most – if not all – image file types. Let me know if you find a file type that isn't supported!
Make sure your system has ExifTool present in its PATH, or simply put the executable (exiftool.exe on Windows) in the root directory of this project. Then run the code with:
python adjust_time.py [path_to_file_or_dir] [adjustment_regex] (optional [-m])
The adjustment_regex is valid when it contains at least:
- A sign (+ or -) at the start.
- Any combination of days (d), hours (h), minutes (m), or seconds (s).
Examples work best, don't they? You can for instance add 1 day, 2 hours, 3 minutes, and 42 seconds to all images in a directory called /home/images by running:
python adjust_time.py "/home/images" +1d2h3m42s
Alternatively, if a single file needs to be set back 1 hour, just run:
python adjust_time.py "/home/images/damn_timezones.jpg" -1h
Don't worry, the script will ask (once) whether you're really okay with modifying the EXIF data of the images (it does overwrite the existing images; no original copy is kept). But hey, if you made a mistake and you want to undo a time adjustment, simply flip the sign and adjust_time again!
Finally, note that there's an additional, optional parameter -m that can be used to disregard MIMETypes altogether. However, this means that all files in the directory and subdirectories will have their dates adjusted, including non-image files. You probably do not want this. Use at your own risk, ideally when images don't have MIMETypes and you've already separated them.
In utils.py you can find which EXIF date keys are adjusted. This was based on my own images; feel free to let me know if you come across any other Date(Time) EXIF keys where its value also represents the date_taken of an image (on Windows for instance, the FileAccessDate and FileCreateDate are often much later dates than the main DateTimeOriginal EXIF key).
If you're program-hungry, here are two ideas I thought of already:
- Modify the regular expression to allow setting one specific datetime rather than being relative to the existing datetime of each file.
- Instead of using MIMETypes, give users the option to check whether files are images based on file extension alone (for when MIMETypes aren't available).