Lightroom: When exporting jpegs allow the user to set the date time created/modified to the original date

Can you explain why this would be valuable?

Here is an example: I took wedding photos with my in camera raw format. I made exposure adjustments and want to export those as jpgs for my sister. They can't be viewed in Windows7 for example in time/date order, because the time date will no longer be the 1 of June, at 5:22 pm. etc.

She shouldn't need to purchase lightroom just to view her photos in order.

Unless your camera counter rolled over from 9999 to 0000 during the shoot, a simple sort by filename should put them in the correct order.

When you export your JPEGs you can also assign a sequence number to the exported file name. This allows the Windows or Mac operating system to order them - even if they all show the same file creation date and time stamp.

I guess what I want is a way to copy "Date Time Original" to "Created Date."

What does "Created Date" actually mean? What tool are you using that uses that term? It's not a standard term for photographic metadata.

There are three Date/Time fields -- Original, which is the creation date of the photograph; Digitized, which is the creation date of the digital representation (which is the same thing as Original for digital cameras), and Modification, which is the last time the file content was modified.

These are not the same thing as the dates and times associated with the *file* as seen by the operating system (Windows or MacOS).

If your goal is to have Windows sort the files in the order you want them sorted, I don't know whether WIndows can sort on the photographic metadata (I'm not a Windows user). But even if it can, some photos won't have that metadata. The sure-fire way to do it is to create filenames that the operating system can sort properly by using a sequence number or the date/time in the filename, as Rikk suggests.

I was referring to original.

So the OS are sorting on FILE DATA, which is different from EXIF data!

Sounds like it is something the OS should improve.

Perhaps there is a Lightroom plugin that Sync File Creation Date with EXIF Original Date?

Jeffrey's Metadata Wrangler can set the file modification time to match DateTimeOriginal.

Metadatawrangler plugin by Jfiedl has a check box to change the file "date modified" and "date created" to the DateTimeOriginal which works!!!!!

"Set the exported image file's modification date to the image date"

The OS (specifically in this case Windows 7) CAN sort on multiple criteria. Typically it will be file name, but there are many other options including DATE TAKEN....though this is dependent upon the 'Date Taken' being included when you export a file from Lightroom (if you check the Minimize Embedded Metadata option, for example, then that field will be blank).

Changing the file created or modified date/time to be the same as the capture date just isn't realistic, in my opinion. Even if Lightroom could somehow persuade the Operating System to do this (which I doubt), then the Operating System would be sort of lying by then displaying an incorrect file creation/modified date/time. I'll take Mark's word that Metadata Wrangler can do this with the modified date/time, though instinctively that feels wrong to me.

But this is all academic really....it's highly likely that, when a bunch of files are exported from Lightroom and written to disk, they will physically be all over the place. The key to what you want to do is to list them in some kind of sensible order, and then to be able to present them to the user in the same order. Explorer has many ways of listing them, including as I said Date Taken, but you then need some kind of picture viewer that will show them in that preferred order. I've had a very quick look at a few options: both Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Picture Viewer seem to be quite stubborn and insist on showing the pictures in ascending file name order, no matter how they are listed in Explorer. Picasa Photo Viewer seems much more accommodating and will happily display them in the chosen sort order. There will doubtless be many other tools available, some of which may do what you want.

Bottom Line: do as suggested by Rikk and Mark and export your photos in the required order with an ascending file name structure.

I think I can understand what Jill is trying to achieve.

Date Created and Date Modified are file system time stamps, which are shown as Explorer columns more or less by default and therefore present an easy way of sorting in Windows Explorer. These time stamps come from the file systems directory entry and represent the creation/modified date of the file itself.

Date Created is actually not a good time stamp to go by for (almost) anything, as this gets updated as as you copy/move files from one volume to another, because a new file is created. Date Modified stays stable even in a move/copy operation to another volume.

Sorting by "Date Original" (and other photographic metadata) is possible in Windows Explorer (the columns have to be explicitely added), but involves a lot more I/O as this information cannot be retrieved from the directory entries, but have to be retrieved from within the file itself. This can be time consuming, especially if the files reside on a slow medium.

This is not to say I need the funtionality of this thread, but rather an attempt to explain what might be behind the request.

Beat

This is one reason some people choose a filenaming convention with the date-time at the front of it, for example:

YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS-MS_{photog/camera...}

That way, alphabetical is same as capture time order, regardless of how many photographers shot it with how many cameras, or whether camera number rolled over...

I've been very tempted to resort to this scheme since unfortunately many photo handling software's don't handle capture-time ordering well if at all, but most support alphabetical ordering. One of my presentation softwares supports capture-time for photos, but then the folders are all out of order - how almost is that?

The downside, besides very long filenames, is some software, including Lightroom does not support hi-rez time formatting in the filenaming options (no sub-second time).

Anyway, maybe the metadata wrangler is a good compromise for now...

See related 'Idea': Sub-second field in filenames

Photo Date Changer in the App Store also works
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photo-...

I also need this trivial feature. I remove all the metadata (including EXIF) when I export, and the files come from different sources, so neither EXIF based tools nor the file names help to sort in chronological order after the export.