Photo Date Adjustator – Quick Start

Getting you started quickly

This section will give you a quick overview over Photo Date Adjustator's user interface and how to get you going with renaming your photo files.

Home button: The home button on the navigation bar of Photo Date Adjustator gets you to the main or home sheet. Here you can select which photo files you want to process, where to put the processed files in your file system and you can browse through all the files you have selected.
Input Files/Folders: First step is always to select a folder or individual files within a folder that you want to use as input to the adjustment procedure. You can either click this button or you can drag & drop files or folders here from Finder or your Mac's desktop. Once you have made your selection here, Photo Date Adjustator will start scanning all files – and if recursive processing of folders is enabled in the configuration of Photo Date Adjustator also the sub-folders within the folder you provided as input –, read their metadata and once finished list all photo files found in the table below (7). It's important to note that Photo Date Adjustator will process each input file at most once, i.e. if a file has been successfully adjusted it will not be processed again even if you press "Start" a second time. If you want to re-process a file, you have to re-select it as input to Photo Date Adjustator first and hence start over. Caveat: If you want to process several hundred or thousands of input files, please read Sandboxing and Processing Many Files first!
Output Folder: Second step is always to provide an output folder where Photo Date Adjustator will move or copy the processed photo files, except if you have selected to process those files in-place, i.e. adjust the original input file in the folder where it is currently stored.
Process in-place, copy or move?: By default, Photo Date Adjustator will always the original input files in-place.. Alternatively, Photo Date Adjustator can also process the original file and move it into the output folder or process a copy of the original input file placed into the output folder, thus not changing your original input file.
Do not change any metadata timestamps of a photo [...or other metadata options]: When pressing the 'Start' button below, depending on what value was selected from the list of options here, Photo Date Adjustator will either leave any timestamp metadata of the processed photos untouched or it will change them according to the option selected. The options can be used to set an absolute date and time for all photos, to shift all timestamps of the photos forward or backward in time by a given offset (e.g. days or hours), to have all photos be shifted to a new starting timestamp while keeping their relative distance to each other (with this you can move an entire series of photos to a different point in time if, e.g., your camera had a wrong date set or timezone set), or you can decide to distribute them in equi-distance between two reference timestamps. You can also use Photo Date Adjustator to set timestamps for photos that do not carry any timestamp information in their metadata.
When changing the fileystem creation timestamp, [do the following with the filesystem 'last modification' timestamp]: Here you can define whether the modification timestamp of a file shall remain untouched, be set to the 'creation' timestamp (= default) or simply reflect the current point in time when you actually process the file in Photo Data Adjustator.
Reset, Eject and Refresh buttons: Use those buttons to reset the input or output files/folders set, eject any external storage mounted (if that's the case) or reload the input files for another round of processing.
Process sub-folders: If this option is selected, Photo Date Adjustator will recursively process the input folder as well as all its sub-folders (and those within). If this option is disabled, only the files in the currently selected folder will be processed.
Re-create sub-folders: If you select this option and have Process sub-folders enabled as well, Photo Date Adjustator will re-create the sub-folders found in the input folder in the exact same structure within the output folder. This allows you to process files stored in arbitrary sub-folder structures and maintaining this structure while processing individual files. If this option is disabled, Photo Date Adjustator will move or copy the input files 'flat' into the output folder.
Settings button: The Settings button on the navigation bar opens the Settings sheet. There you can customize some of the behavior of Photo Date Adjustator. See Settings for more details on settings.
Coffee Donation button: Gets you to the Coffee Donation section where you make a coffee donation to the author of Photo Date Adjustator in case you like the app and feel about supporting the development and maintenance of it. No worries – all just a voluntary, one time donation of course.
About button: Gets you to the About section where you find links to product support, latest version information, release notes and other relevant information.
Help button: The help button on the navigation bar gets you to this documentation on Photo Date Adjustator's support website.
Photo Files Table: Once the scanning of the input files/folders is completed, you'll get the complete list of input files presented as a table through which you can scroll. The table can be sorted by columns (simply click a table column title to sort ascending or descending), can be filtered by content, and columns can be resized and re-ordered.
Hovering over a value: Hovering the mouse pointer over a value in a row of the table will bring up a tooltip displaying the file path of the respective file and/or various other file related information of interest.
Selecting one or more lines: If you select a line in the table, the respective photo gets displayed in the info pane to the right (11) as well as the list of all EXIF etc. metadata attributes and their values are listed (15). You can select several lines by pressing the Option or Shift keys. When editing an individual, selected file's adjusted metadata timestamp, this timestamp will be applied to all selected files.
Photo: If you select a row in the table of photo files (7), the respective photo will be displayed in the Info Pane. Double-clicking the photo will open the default application associated with this media type (e.g. Apple's Preview app or a photo application). You can click the little picture icon to achieve the same. Clicking the little window icon will open Finder and automatically select the current photo file in the Finder window.
Adjusted Media Timetamp: Here you can adjust an individual file's media timestamp by clicking on and editing its components. You can type the respective data and time figures or use the up and down arrow keys to increment or decrement the respective timestamp component. The tab key moves to the next component, Shift+Tab to the previous one. When you have edited an individual media timestamp, the pin icon to the right will be be highlighted. Any pinned timestamp is excempt from the mass operations applied via the bulk-change option in the upper part of the window (see 5) until you 'unpin' it again via clicking the pin icon in the info panel or in the respective table row.
Show in groups: When selected, the metadata attributes will be sorted and grouped by metadata category (e.g. EXIF or Makernotes). When deselected, all attributes will be shown 'flat'.
Metadata attribute filter: The text you type here will be used to filter and display only those metadata attributes whose name or value contains the entered sequence of characters. E.g., entering 'Time' will only show metadata attributes below that contain the text 'Time'.
Photo Metadata Attributes: If you select a row in the table of photo files (7), the photo's EXIF, TIFF or other metadata attributes will be displayed with their respective values. You can right-click on metadata names or values to copy them to the clipboard.
Diff column comparing file system and media timestamps: This column displays a green equal icon if for the respective photo file both media creation timestamp and file creation timestamp are identical. If the values point to the same absolute time, but are expressed relative to different time zones, i.e. if the timestamps are equivalent, an orange equivalence sign is shown. If the two timestamps are different, a red unequal sign is displayed. Since file system timestamps do not support sub-second timestamp resolution, only full seconds are considered (media filestamps may carry subseecond timestamp information).
Diff column comparing current and adjusted media timestamps: This column displays a green equal icon if for the respective photo file the current media creation timestamp and the adjusted creation timestamp are identical. If the values point to the same absolute time, but are expressed relative to different time zones, i.e. if the timestamps are equivalent, an orange equivalence sign is shown. If the two timestamps are different, a red unequal sign is displayed.
Adjusted Media Timestamp: The adjusted media timestamp in this column can be edited by clicking on the desired timestamp picker. If a value has been changed individually, a little 'pin' icon is displayed to the right of the timestamp. If the value has not been manually changed, but has been derived by the bulk-change option in the upper part of the window (see 5), a little 'clock' icon with circling arrows is shown to indicate that this value is part of the automatic bulk adjustment.
Start (n files remaining): Once you have selected input and output files/folders, you can hit the 'Start' button to trigger the processing of input files. The button's text will tell you how many files remain to be processed from the entire set of photo files scanned from the input folder(s) you provided.
It is important to note that Photo Date Adjustator will process each photo file at most once! The photo file table displays the status of each photo file in the 'Status' column. If a file can't be accessed for adjusting its filesystem timestamps or if you run out of disk space for copying the processed files during processing – all these things can keep Photo Date Adjustator from processing a photo file successfully. You can then take some action, e.g. make some additional space available on your filesystem or uncheck the respective options in the Settings, and press 'Start' again to try to re-process those photo files that haven't passed successfully in the previous run. Once all files have been processed and there are no more remaining files, the 'Start' button will be disabled. If you want to start over again, simply set an input folder or input files again (see 5).
Refresh Button: Once all files have been processed (or if you decide to start over prior to that), you need to refresh the input file list if you want to process them once more. Pressing this button will reload all files as if you had just selected them in the Input Files (see 2) field.
Before/After Selector: Once you have processed input files, the "Before/After" selector will show up allowing you to switch between displaying files with their properties as they were before the processing and their respective properties after processing. This allows you to more easily compare the changes applied. If no "after" state is existing because a file couldn't be properly processed, it's before state will be shown.