TV and Photos in Windows Vista - Sort Photos Chronologically
(Page 3 of 7 )
Let me guess. You just had this big party (say, a wedding or commitment ceremony), and you’ve gotten hundreds of photos from a dozen different people. But when you stick them all in the same folder and sort them by date, they’re all out of order.
The Date Modified column in Windows Explorer (go to View ➝ Details if you don’t see it) probably won’t reliably sort your photos. If the photographer did any post-processing (e.g., color correction, cropping, retouching) in a program like Photoshop, the file’s date will reflect the last time the file was saved, not when the photo was originally shot. Also, file dates and times are typically set when a digital camera saves photos to its memory card, not necessarily when the photos are taken. (The discrepancy occurs because many high-end cameras hold the shots in memory before saving them.)
But aren’t you lucky you live in an enlightened age of obsessive photographers and feature-laden gadgets? Embedded in each digital photo is a goldmine of information stored by the camera as part of the EXIF (EXchangeable Image File) format used in .jpg files, .tif files, and raw formats like Nikon’s .nef files. EXIF data includes the date and time the photo was taken, the camera settings used (f-stop, exposure, metering mode), the photographer’s name (sometimes), and the dimensions of the image. If the camera supports it, even GPS data indicating the exact geographical location of the camera when the photo was shot can be included.
To view EXIF data for a single photo, highlight the image file in Windows Explorer, and then stretch the Details pane until it looks like Figure 4-18. If you don’t see a Details pane, click the Organize drop-down and select Layout ➝ Details Pane.
Figure 4-18. Windows Explorer shows all the EXIF information embedded in your digital photos, if you know where to look
Of course, you won’t find EXIF data in scans of film, nor in digital photos that were modified by software that doesn’t support the format. For the record, recent versions of Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, and even Vista’s measly little Paint program, retain all EXIF data in most circumstances, but many older programs and image converters do not. If in doubt, run a little test before you modify any precious photos: open a photo in your program and save it to a new filename. If the information shows up in Windows Explorer when you highlight the new file, then your software is safe to use.
If you select more than one file, Explorer will only show the data the selected files have in common in the Details pane. To view selective EXIF data for a bunch of photos at once, right-click the column header bar in Windows Explorer and select More. Place a checkmark next to any new details you’d like to display, and click OK. Unfortunately, the details aren’t organized at all here; the EXIF data is mixed in with MP3 tags, and other things like Search ranking and Parental rating reason. But with a little digging, you should be able to find the relevant bits, like Dimensions, Camera model, and, thankfully, Date Picture Taken.
Now, sort the photos chronologically by clicking the Date Picture Taken column header. Voilà!
But what if you want to make this sorting more permanent? Use the free Stamp utility (http://www.snapfiles.com/get/stamp.html) to rename your files with their EXIF dates. After you do this, your photos will appear in chronological order even when sorted alphabetically.
What Stamp doesn’t do, unfortunately, is allow you to compensate for the differences among the various cameras’ internal clocks. The discrepancies might be as small as three or four minutes among your local guests, or several hours for the party guest who last set up his or her camera in a different time zone. As a result, your photos won’t sort properly even after you use Stamp, a problem requiring the following three-part fix:
First, download the free trial of Creative Element Power Tools (available at http://www.creativelement.com/powertools/), and turn on the Change file dates and Rename files with ease options.
Highlight all the photos you want to fix, right-click, and select Change Date.
Choose the Date/Time from file metadata option, select Date & time photo taken by digital camera from the list, and then click Accept. This will change all the file dates so they exactly match the dates and times the photos were taken.
Next, you’ll need to determine the discrepancies among your photographers. Pick one photographer to use as the baseline, and then figure out how far off every other photographer is from that baseline. To do this, you’ll need to find common points of reference: one or two representative photos of the same instant by each of your photographers. (The more photos you have, the easier this will be.) After a minute or so of studying, you might find that, say, Kathryn’s camera was about 3 hours faster than the baseline, while Henry’s camera was 6 minutes, 11 seconds slower. (If you’re not as compulsive as I am, you don’t necessarily need to get it down to the exact second.)
- To fix the dates, pick a photographer (other than the baseline you chose in step 4), and highlight all of that person’s photos. Right-click the files and select Change Date.
- This time, choose the Relative Date/Time option and then make your adjustments with the controls below, like the example in Figure 4-19. Click Accept when you’re done.
Figure 4-19. Use the Change Date tool to fix discrepancies among the times of different
photographers’ digital photos
- Repeat steps 5 and 6 for everyone else’s photos. When you’re done, the photos should be in perfect order when sorted by Modified Date (but not Date Taken, at least not yet).
To update the EXIF data with your new dates, use AttributeMagic Pro (http://www.attributemagic.com/). Select the recently modified files in the main window, use the Change Dates feature, and instruct it to set “date taken” (exif) to “modified” (file system).
If you don’t feel comfortable messing with your photos’ valuable EXIF tags, you can alternatively change only the filenames, as described next.
At this point, all your photos should appear in chronological order when sorted by modified date or date taken, but depending on what you plan to do with your pictures, this may not be enough.
Are you uploading your photos to an online photo sharing/printing service? Or perhaps you’re handing them off to someone else to sift through and possibly modify them? If you want to make sure your careful date manipulations remain intact, you may want to tag your filenames as well.
You can do this with Stamp, as described earlier, but only if you’ve updated the EXIF dates as described in step 8, previously. But if you want to rename your photos without changing any EXIF data, you’ll need Power Rename (also part of Creative Element Power Tools) to tag the filenames with their modified dates. To do this, highlight all the photos, right-click, and select Power Rename.
If you’ve already renamed the photos with Stamp, place a checkmark next to Power Rename’s Crop option, select from beginning, and type a number representing the amount of text to remove. This will get rid of Stamp’s addition to the filename and make room for Power Rename’s own Add stamp feature.
In Power Rename, place a checkmark next to the Add stamp option, select file date & time, and then click the Format button. From the Choose a format list, select Custom format and then use the date/time placeholders from the list to assemble a date format conducive to sorting. Your best bet is to start with the year (yy oryyyy), followed by the month, day, hour, minute, and finally, the second, like this:
yyyy-mm-dd_hh-mm-ss
For example, Power Rename would take a file with the date August 28, 2005 at 4:53:06 pm and add this to the beginning of the filename:
2005-08-28_16-53-06
Click OK and then the Accept button to rename the files. With all your photos date- and time-corrected and renamed accordingly, they’ll appear in chronological order in almost any circumstance.
Next: Media Center Annoyances >>
More BrainDump Articles
More By O'Reilly Media
|
 This article is excerpted from chapter four of the book Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks for the Cranky Consumer, written by David A. Karp (O'Reilly, 2008; ISBN: 0596527624). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
|
|
