I went on vacations and took my new GPS (Garmin eTrex Legend HCX) with me and let it record a track for the whole trip because I was planning to geotag all images. We took two cameras with us and, luckily I remembered to take a picture of the current GPS time with each camera. Now that I got home I realized that one of the cameras was set on the wrong date (1 day late) and started searching for a tool to modify the EXIF metadata.

First I tried ExifTool by Phil Harvey but for some reason it wouldn’t change the file timestamp, only the EXIF metadata, maybe because I was using the Windows version. The one I found that allowed me to correct both the file timestamp and the EXIF metadata was Time Stamp Modifier for JPEG Files. It did all I wanted and the interface is simple and clean.

Now I only have two things to do, modify the video files timestamp accordingly and geotag the pictures. When I’ve done that I’ll update this post.

Update 1:

Modifying the video files timestamp wasn’t easy. The info about the date and time of when the video was taken is recorded into the AVI as RIFF metadata. There only one program that I know that can modify that metadata (one file at a time) is abcAVI and even this one can not modify all the data about the date. The thing is that no other program can read those tags correctly so I just chose to ignore them and concentrate on setting the file timestamp correctly. For this I used Moo0 TimeStamp to edit the timestamps for “date created” and “date modified”, correcting the time difference between the gps and the cameras.

I don’t rely that much on file timestamps, sometimes they can be changed without ones knowledge by some app or they can be ignored by a backup tool. For the pictures I have the EXIF data, that is correct so I don’t need to worry about the timestamps but for video I can’t rely on RIFF metadata because I didn’t bother to change it, so I decided to rename all files so the date and time of the file creation is in the file name itself. Namexif can do that for pictures but for pictures and video I found Stamp, that can rename based on EXIF metadata and on file timestamp information. That way I can use it to rename both pictures and videos. Stamp supposedly can also get the timestamp from RIFF data but that didn’t work.

Update 2:

Finally, to geotag the pictures I used GeoSetter. It worked OK, even thou I had to mess around with the maximum allowed time difference from the time the picture was taken to the last GPS position because there where times when I turned off the GPS because I was standing at the same place for a while.