Updating Exif data in your photographs and images

Geosetter in Windows 7 is good and the best but it cannot do what it is supposed to be able to do, which is to change a large number of files all at once. As far as possible, make changes using geosetter.

Geosetter actually uses exiftool and gpsbabel. geosetter will update exiftool for you automatically but it will install it for you only for use by geosetter. Other programs cannot use it.

exiftool is a command line tool that is very powerful. It can set all files even within subdirectories.

You can search for it in C:\Program Files (x86)\GeoSetter\tools or you can download it.
Edit the enviroment variable PATH for user to the path where exiftool resides.

Use computer>properties>advanced system properties>environment variables.

The difficulty is in finding the names of tags and the values to put into them.

The date taken is called datetimeoriginal. The time to enter is YYYY:MM:DDHH:MM:SS+ZZ:ZZ

I should use the command
exiftool -overwrite_original -datetimeoriginal=1990:12:0812:00:00+0800 -timezone=+08:00 *.jpg

Actually it still does not work all the time.


 http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/faq.html
5. "How do I format date and time information for writing?"

All information (including date/time information) is written in the same format as it is read out. When reading, ExifTool converts all date and time information to standard EXIF format, so this is also the way it is specified when writing. The standard EXIF date/time format is "YYYY:mm:dd HH:MM:SS", and some meta information formats such as XMP also allow sub-seconds and a timezone to be specified. The timezone format is "+HH:MM", "-HH:MM" or "Z". For example:

exiftool -xmp:dateTimeOriginal="2005:10:23 20:06:34.33-05:00" a.jpg

When writing XMP or other information types which allow incomplete date/time values, the following input formats are also accepted:

YYYY
YYYY:mm
YYYY:mm:dd
YYYY:mm:dd HH:MM

Having said this, ExifTool is very flexible about the actual format of input date/time values when writing, and will attempt to reformat any values into the standard format unless the -n option is used. Any separators may be used (or in fact, none at all). The first 4 consecutive digits found in the value are interpreted as the year, then next 2 digits are the month, and so on. [The year must be 4 digits. Other fields are expected to be 2 digits, but a single digit is allowed if the subsequent character is a non-digit.] For EXIF date/time values, all 6 date/time fields must exist ("YYYYmmddHHMMSS"), but XMP date/time values require only the year ("YYYY"). This feature facilitates useful operations such as setting date/time tags from a date embedded in the file name. For example, the command

exiftool "-alldates<filename" c:\images

will set the common date/time tags from the file name for all images in the directory "c:\images". This will work for any file name which matches the above criteria (ie. "IMG_20110927_103000.jpg"). [AllDates is a shortcut for 3 tag names: DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate and ModifyDate. See the Shortcuts Tags documentation for more information.]

The -d option allows full control over the format of date/time values when reading. However, the effect of the -d option is not reversible, so date/time values must be written using the format described above, even when the -d option is used. Note that when reading, the effect of the -n option on date/time values is only to disable the -d formatting.

Special feature: A value of "now" may be used to represent the current time when writing any date/time tag. For example:

exiftool -xmp:dateTimeOriginal=now a.jpg

[There is also a Now tag which may be used for a similar purpose by copying its value to another tag, but copying tags adds an extra read stage to the processing which is best avoided if performance is an issue.]