Lightroom Classic: Edit Capture Time issue - Need a way to set all photos selected to same date & time

That's right. When you apply Metadata > Edit Capture Time to a number of photos, the corrected time is applied to the most selected photo, and the dates of all the other photos are adjusted by the same amount. This is described at the top of the command window:



You could use the Capture Time To Exif plugin to set all the photos to have the same date/time:

http://photographers-toolbox.com/prod...

Other requests for this functionality:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

Yes, I have to use ExifToolGUI for this. I'm adding dates to re-photographed transparencies. I may know the date, but not the time. In LR I have to invent different times for each image - so no good for batches.

Bob Frost

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Lightroom: Metadata Edit Capture Time should set multiple files to the same time.

The 'edit capture time' behavior discussed in http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh... is counter intuitive and is a royal pain for us folk using non digital source images where the capture time is only known to a day or month or less accuracy. Not having flickr-style range dates is a root issue but the 'edit capture time' setting should IMHO do what it is told - set all photos to a specified time.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Lightroom: Metadata Edit Capture Time Is Erratic and Unpredictable.

Lightroom 3.4.1 running on Win XP/SP3.

Error when selecting a group of photos in the grid view and then Metadata-->Edit Capture Time.

The capture time is only updated for some of the photos, and the remaining photos' capture times are either unchanged or changed to an unpredictable date/time. Changing metadata for photos individually works fine.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled LIGHTROOM - changing date taken for many pictures at once.

changing date taken with many pictures selected doesnt work correct. If the active pic has the wanted date, selecting "setting time" (first option) and clicking "changing all" does nothing. If you give another date, only some pic changes the date!! (Lightroom 6.3, no cloud version"

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Capture date/time change not working as described.

I scan some old film images to my Hard Drive, as Jpg's then import them with LR CC 2015.5.  At this stage the metadata panel shows no dates or times.   I then select several of the scanned images and use the Metadata -> Edit Capture time menu, select "Adjust to a Specific Date/Time" and key in a a specific date & time in the "Corrected Time" box and click "Change All".  

What I expect, is that all the selected images will be set to the date/time I typed in.  But, this is not what happens.  What happens is that the active image gets the typed in date and time but the other images get a similar, but different date time.  

For example, The file time on the scanned image A is 5/9/2016 6:42 pm and the file on img B is 5/9/2016 6:44 pm.  Then in LR I import these two images using the move option and a file rename preset.  When the import is done, the moved files have the same file date/time as before the move however the metadata in LR does not show any date fields (I have EXIF and IPTC view selected).  
Now I select both images with the first one being the active image, go to menu  Metadata -> Edit Capture time.  In the dialog that comes up I select "Adjust to a specific date and time", I fill in 10/15/1984 2:00:00 pm and click the "Change All" button.  Now in LR, there are two dates showing for each image.  The first image (which was the active image when I did the date change) has 10/15/1984 2:00:00 pm for both the "Date Time Original" and "Date Time" metadata fields as expected.  However, the 2nd image has 10/15/1984 2:01:39 pm for those two fields.  In other words the 2nd images' time is 1 minute and 39 seconds later than the date time I typed in.  

This is not what the text "Adjust to a Specific Date/time" implies should happen.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Lightroom: Edit capture time "Adjust to specified time" broken.

Edit Capture Time used to work (at least, I remember it working). Now it seems to be completely broken. Even if I click "Adjust to a specified date and time", it adjusts all the photos relative to their current dates, which is completely wrong, and very frustrating.

Here are two photos that were taken in May, 1925. One of them has the wrong date.
I try to adjust the dates of both of them

and afterwards, Lightroom has marked one as having been taken in the 19th century

I have run into many issues with setting the dates for historical photos, but I thought I had figured this out. (It would be nice if Lightroom had the facility to set the XMP metadata that correspond to the date of the image vs. the date that this copy was made, but I have never been able to make that work). But at a minimum, Edit Capture Time "Adjust to a specified date and time" really should work correctly. Otherwise you have to edit each photo, and you cannot copy and paste into this dialog.

I have made a separate post (which I hope is not merged into this thread), which explains how I set the capture time of batches of photos.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Lightroom: Action "Metadata -> Modify Capture time" Does not work properly.

LR recently updgraded to 6.10 created issues when importing videos : Videos capture time are not correct in LR while they are correct in the windows explorer.
I tried to use "Metada -> Modify capture time" option, but experience an issue : 
When I select several videos, it modifies correctly only the two first vdeos of the selection. The other videos capture dates are also modified but to "random dates" (!)

Hello, Thanks for your reply. Here are details. Let's take example of video file IMG_1984.MOV. file was imported by LR from an iPhone to the LR catalog and copied on folder P:/photos/iphone on my laptop Hard drive.

In windows : "Modified = 14/04/2017" (which is the capture date) "Created = 15/04/2017" (which is the date the file was copied on the laptop hard drive)
in Lightroom : "Capture date = 15/10/2013"

Now, I notice the following : in the same catalog and same folder there is a picture with the following filename : IMG_1984.JPG  and this picture cature date is... 15/10/2013.  So it sounds like, when importing the video, LR took the capture date if the Image with same filename. It is a strange behavior from LR. If LR does not consider extensions, than it should have been identified as a duplicate when importing.... 

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Lightroom: Batch changes to date/time.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Lightroom 4: More Flexible Capture Time Adjustments.The lightroom 4 capture adjustment options available are great if you have an actual camera capture time as all photos (though maybe not with the correct date or time) will at least be in chronological order. However, it is not so great when trying to catalog scanned images with only approximate ideas of when the image was captured.

I've been scanning lots of ancient family photos and am using lightroom 4 to catalog them. For most of these photos I only have vague ideas of when they might have been taken. And hardly any were scanned in a chronological order.

To be able to view them by capture time in a relatively chronological order lightroom should allow the following:

A) Incomplete capture times (e.g. if you only know the year and month ... it could be entered e.g. as DD.04.1964 HH:MM:SS) and that way they would be listed either at the beginning or the end of all the april photos of 64)

B) Batch changes of a single entry (i.e. instead of changing the date & time relative to a chosen photo within a selection, change all the photos in that selection to a specific date/time)

Note: This conversation was created from a reply on: Lightroom ignores partial dates imported from Elements.

Hi Verena. See my and John Ellis's posts in this thread for ways to set the capture date on historical photos.

Regarding approximate times, it would be nice to have this, but Lightroom needs to be consistent with the available ways to write metadata into photos, and, AFAIK, there is no standard for approximate times. (Just as there also isn't any standard for approximate locations). I use a keyword "± 1 day," "± 1 month;" but I agree that there should be a standard for this. But it isn't just a Lightroom shortcoming.

A

YES; please make this work.  It is so frustrating to not be able to set the capture date to what you want for a batch of photos.  I can see the reason for this batch reference date change.  But more often, I want to batch change photos (scans) to the SAME date.  Its frustrating to have to use another vendor tool to just change the date outside of Lightroom.

Frustrating that 2 years of requesting a simple batch date change without rippling; and LR still cant do it!