Aperture not changing dates properly

Question

Level 1

8 points

Aperture not changing dates properly

I have a lot of old photos I have scanned over a period of a couple of years.

I would like to be able to sort them by the date I think they were taken, so I need to change the dates of the files to specific dates. I want to be able to do groups at a time. Like all photos taken on a birthday, and for pictures I do not know the date for, dated to the date the person in them died.

When I click on a group of photos Aperture changes the dates in a relative fashion rather than an absolute fashion. IE If I scanned the images that were taken on the same day but were scanned 2 months apart, the date that appears on one is correct, the other 2 months off. I would like to change the dates to specific day in time.

Aperture 2, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), with aperture 3 upgrade disk

Posted on Aug 23, 2014 4:37 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 23, 2014 11:18 PM in response to ruggersf

To my knowledge, a scanned photo has the date when it was scanned. Thats it. The photo itself doesn't know when the shot was taken with the camera.

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Answer 2

léonie

Level 10

195,113 points

Aug 23, 2014 11:41 PM in response to ruggersf

I would like to be able to sort them by the date I think they were taken, so I need to change the dates of the files to specific dates. I want to be able to do groups at a time. Like all photos taken on a birthday, and for pictures I do not know the date for, dated to the date the person in them died.

Which Aperture version are you using now? Your profile signature is a bit ambiguous:

Aperture 2, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), with aperture 3 upgrade disk

If you have matching Aperture 3 and iPhoto '11 versions, opening your Aperture library in iPhoto '11 would allow you to change the dates of your scans easily, see this discussion:

Re: Date adjustment BUG ? (3.5.1)

iPhoto has a batch change command, that allows you to set the date and time of a batch of photos to the same date, but to increment it in fixed steps, so the photos will be sorted in time.

If you don't have a matching iPhoto, you can adjust the dates in Aperture 3 by using "Metadata > Adjust Date and Time". This will shift the date and time of all selected photos by the same fixed amount. The dates will remain sorted by the order you scanned them.

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Answer 3

ruggersf Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 24, 2014 8:17 AM in response to léonie

Sounds like the answer is there is no way to change the date on a group of scanned photos in Aperture. It sounds more like the "ADJUST DATE AND TIME" is more for when you travel somewhere and forget to set the date/time on your camera, you can make the correction.

Because I have found iPhoto and Aperture do not play together well, I think I just do the adjustment one by one.

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Answer 4

léonie

Level 10

195,113 points

Aug 24, 2014 8:33 AM in response to ruggersf

Because I have found iPhoto and Aperture do not play together well, I think I just do the adjustment one by one.

What happened, when you tried? I am using iPhoto frequently for tasks, that are not supported in Aperture. The unified library introduced with Aperture 3.3 works rather well for: Aperture 3.3: Using a unified photo library with iPhoto and Aperture

If you do not want to open your main library in iPhoto, you could create a new library just for your scan projects (or export the projects with the scans as a new library from Aperture), batch change the dates of the scans in iPhoto, then import the iPhoto library as a library into Aperture.

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Answer 5

Aug 24, 2014 10:19 AM in response to ruggersf

You can easily set the date and time of any number of images to a specific value by using ExifTool by Phil Harvey a command line utility.

For example the following command

exiftool -DateTimeOriginal='2013:08:01 1:30:0' IMG_1735.JPG

would set the date and time of the original image file to that value. It is also possible to do groups of files or complete directories.

regards

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Answer 6

léonie

Level 10

195,113 points

Aug 24, 2014 10:36 AM in response to Frank Caggiano

Can you step the date by a fixed increment with exiftool, e.g. one second between successive image files this way? ruggersf wants to be able to sort successive files by date, if I understood the question correctly. It would be great if exiftool could do that as well.

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Answer 7

ruggersf Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 24, 2014 11:52 AM in response to léonie

Well that is a whole different question that I have not bothered addressing. i find that the projects/journals/webpages and things get corrupted moving them between the two different programs. I spent an few hours building a custom photo album in one, and then when I opened it in the other program I was faced with massive corruption of my file and ended up having to rebuild. That is what soured me to using both programs to access the same database.

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Answer 8

ruggersf Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 24, 2014 11:56 AM in response to Frank Caggiano

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/

thanks. interesting workaround, but not that easy as I would have to get the list of file names and export them somewhere to run the command line utility. I have a few hundred people in my database and a few thousand photos. I was wondering if Aperture had a way to do it on its own. I think the idea of exporting the photos to a new project, editing them in iPhoto and reimporting the same photos might work. My only concern there is the photos are referenced by my genealogy in the Aperture database. I hope by exporting then importing them, the links will not be broken.

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Answer 9

Aug 24, 2014 12:04 PM in response to léonie

léonie wrote:

Can you step the date by a fixed increment with exiftool, e.g. one second between successive image files this way? ruggersf wants to be able to sort successive files by date, if I understood the question correctly. It would be great if exiftool could do that as well.

Not sure, exiftool can do a lot of things that I have yet to discover. However even if it can't setting up a script to do it wouldn;t be to hard, And from rereading the OP's posts I'm not sure just what is wanted. Setting all the images in a group to the same date and time might be sufficient.

regards

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Answer 10

Aug 24, 2014 12:09 PM in response to ruggersf

Not sure what the link you posted refers to. It requires me to make an account before it will let me proceed.

As for your situation, if iPhoto will resolve it that will be the way to go but if it doesn't using exiftool shouldn't be to hard to setup. Also keep it in mind for future scans (if there are any), using it to set the date on the scanned image before importing will make your job a lot easier.

regards

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