I have a large number of photos that I am hand dating to attempt to get them in a chronological order …. I prefer to adjust them in explorer under date taken, I just find it easier. Mostly it is working well but I have noticed that tonfotos doesn’t always put them in the same order as explorer. Hopefully my screenshots come through correctly (new to this) You can see it is picking up a date assigned “a long time ago”. Anyway to tonfoto use the date taken field?




Thanks,
Michelle

    • Andrey

    • Post #2
    • Edited

    smjacb Could it be because the file in in the first screenshot is not the same as on next ones? The file name is different.

      No, I just picked the wrong file. There are 14 files with this exact problem out of 293 files in this folder. So about 5%. I have 128GB of files to go through so I want to make sure my changes are 100% effective. Early on, in tonfotos, I forgot to click the button that says make the date change stagnant and that took days to unravel so although your program works it is not the most efficient way for me.

        smjacb Ok, thanks, I just wanted to make sure this is not just simple human mistake.

        Just to give you some background, there about 14 of different possible date fields in metadata that I know about, and every software works with its own subset, and treats those dates differently. While developing Tonfotos we tested it for compatibility with several most popular programs to make sure what we edit gets understood by them and vice versa. Explorer was one of them. Are you sure you edited dates in those files by Explorer, not some other software?

        In any case, I would appreciate you sending some of those images to us so we can examine it closer, the address is support@tonfotos.com

          smjacb Thank you for sharing images. After closer inspection, these files contain conflicting dates. Creation date strored in Exif is 2024, while date in XMP field xap:CreateDate (there several other XMP fields that can potentially store the date) contain 2000, you can clearly see that in Tonfotos in Additional Metadata section on your screenshot.

          As I have explained, there are many different places where data can be stored, across several different metadata formats (JPEG supports Exif, XMP and IPTC at the same time). Unforunately, there is no such thing as “correct place”. All of them are sort of correct, and different appications use different subsets of those fields. And it is unfortunately happens that those date fileds contain contradicting values.

          While developing Tonfotos we try to keep maximum compatibility with several most popular applications, and Windows Explorer is among them, but it is not the only one. In our previous testing Explorer, it was modifying both Exif date and xap:CreateDate. Why it only changed later one in this case - I don’t know. As you said, this is only portion of your files, and for other files date is read correclty.

          The way Tonfotos is currently working, it has priority of dates, and Exif takes precedence. We learned that most of applications behave the same way. However, when you edit date in Tonfotos, it will save it not only into Exif, but also into that xap:CreateDate too, so this change will be visible in all programs we tested with, including Explorer.

          So my advice is to use F3 function of Tonfotos to correct dates on these files. And preferrable use Tonfotos going forward for maximum compatibility.

          We will aslo think what we can do to imporve compatibility with Explorer going forward, but no promises here since this might come at cost of compatibility with other applicaitons.

            Thank you for your reply.

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