Date problem in IPTC Caption template.

[photomech355]

Hi

I've created an IPTC default template for captioning images but when i load it onto an image, the date field does not pick up "Capture Time" as default (i chose this when i created the template).  Instead the template picks up either todays date or a random date that is completely unrelated to the image.

I'm guessing i must have done something incorrectly when i created the template unless its a bug in the program.  Can anyone help?

Many thanks.

PS.  It would be good to have an option in preferences>IPTC to set the date fields to default as "EXIF date taken" because i would never want to use any other date than when a photograph was shot and i'm sure this would be a common choice for other photographers.

[Kirk Baker]

I've created an IPTC default template for captioning images but when i load it onto an image, the date field does not pick up "Capture Time" as default (i chose this when i created the template).  Instead the template picks up either todays date or a random date that is completely unrelated to the image.

I'm guessing i must have done something incorrectly when i created the template unless its a bug in the program.  Can anyone help?

That could be bug.  I will check into it.  What version of Photo Mechanic are you using?  What OS are you running?

PS.  It would be good to have an option in preferences>IPTC to set the date fields to default as "EXIF date taken" because i would never want to use any other date than when a photograph was shot and i'm sure this would be a common choice for other photographers.

In the IPTC Info dialogs, it will already be doing this by default if the IPTC record doesn't contain a date.  In the IPTC Stationery Pad if you apply the date as "Capture Time" then it should overwrite any IPTC date with the date/time that the photo was taken.  If it is not doing that then this would indeed be a bug.

-Kirk

[photomech355]

Hi Kirk,

I'm using version 4.5.3 on Windows XP SP2.

>>>In the IPTC Stationery Pad if you apply the date as "Capture Time" then it should overwrite any IPTC date with the date/time that the photo was taken.  If it is not doing that then this would indeed be a bug.<<<

If i enter the date info manually as "Capture Time" in IPTC Stationary Pad it is saved correctly, but when i try to get the template to apply "Capture Time" as default, thats when things seem to go wrong.

[Kirk Baker]

Hi Kirk,

I'm using version 4.5.3 on Windows XP SP2.

>>>In the IPTC Stationery Pad if you apply the date as "Capture Time" then it should overwrite any IPTC date with the date/time that the photo was taken.  If it is not doing that then this would indeed be a bug.<<<

If i enter the date info manually as "Capture Time" in IPTC Stationary Pad it is saved correctly, but when i try to get the template to apply "Capture Time" as default, thats when things seem to go wrong.

Are you saying that when you reopen the IPTC Stationery Pad, the date setting has changed to something other than "Capture Time"?  Or are you saying that when you apply the IPTC Stationery Pad with the date set to "Capture Time" that your photos IPTC Dates and Times are wrong?

Do you have the checkbox next to the Date field checked (on) in your IPTC Stationery Pad?

-Kirk

[photomech355]

Hi Kirk,

I think i've found out what the problem is but it may be a bug in the program.

>>>>>Are you saying that when you reopen the IPTC Stationery Pad, the date setting has changed to something other than "Capture Time"?  Or are you saying that when you apply the IPTC Stationery Pad with the date set to "Capture Time" that your photos IPTC Dates and Times are wrong?<<<<<<

The answer to both of your questions is no.  Whats happening is that if i create a template, choose capture time as default then save it, when using that template with IPTC Stationary Pad everything works fine.  When I'm in browse or preview mode, click on the "i" button to bring up IPTC Info, and apply my caption template there, the "Capture Time" setting is no longer picked up from the template.

I cant see any reason why it would do this so thats why i think it could be a bug.

[Kirk Baker]

Hi Kirk,

I think i've found out what the problem is but it may be a bug in the program.

>>>>>Are you saying that when you reopen the IPTC Stationery Pad, the date setting has changed to something other than "Capture Time"?  Or are you saying that when you apply the IPTC Stationery Pad with the date set to "Capture Time" that your photos IPTC Dates and Times are wrong?<<<<<<

The answer to both of your questions is no.  Whats happening is that if i create a template, choose capture time as default then save it, when using that template with IPTC Stationary Pad everything works fine.  When I'm in browse or preview mode, click on the "i" button to bring up IPTC Info, and apply my caption template there, the "Capture Time" setting is no longer picked up from the template.

I cant see any reason why it would do this so thats why i think it could be a bug.

When you click on the 'i' button, you're bringing up the IPTC Info for that particular file, not the IPTC Stationery Pad (look at the title of the dialog if you're not sure), so you must be clicking on the "Apply Stationery" button, right?

It may be that there is a bug in how the IPTC Stationery Pad is applied from the IPTC Info dialog.  I'll look into it and fix it in the next version (if there is indeed a bug) but in the meantime, I suggest just applying the IPTC Stationery from the IPTC Stationery Pad dialog itself.

-Kirk

EDIT: I can indeed confirm that this is a bug in the current version.

[photomech355]

Hi Kirk

Just giving you some more information on the bug.

>>>>When you click on the 'i' button, you're bringing up the IPTC Info for that particular file, not the IPTC Stationery Pad (look at the title of the dialog if you're not sure), so you must be clicking on the "Apply Stationery" button, right?<<<<

No, what I'm doing is clicking the "i" button to open IPTC Info for a particular file, then clicking "Load" to load in my template, then i would click OK to apply the change.  I'm not using the "Apply Stationery Pad" button.

[photomech355]

In addition to my previous reply.

I've also found that if you are in IPTC Info using the copy and paste/save&> photo buttons, the date preference is also not pulled across to the next image. This is true even if not using "capture time" but a static date instead.

Using the "capture time" option grays out the date but when in IPTC Info, if i choose "capture time" and click "OK", when i re-enter IPTC Info, the date is not grayed out anymore meaning my preference wasn't saved.

Hope this helps.

[Kirk Baker]

In addition to my previous reply.

I've also found that if you are in IPTC Info using the copy and paste/save&> photo buttons, the date preference is also not pulled across to the next image. This is true even if not using "capture time" but a static date instead.

Using the "capture time" option grays out the date but when in IPTC Info, if i choose "capture time" and click "OK", when i re-enter IPTC Info, the date is not grayed out anymore meaning my preference wasn't saved.

Even if it were working properly, the IPTC Info date and time would just have been set to the capture time and when you looked at it again, the date and time controls would be set to the capture time, and the popup menu would change back to "Date".

The bug is that the capture time or modification time is not being set in the IPTC data long enough to be saved.  There is no workaround: the problem just has to be fixed.

-Kirk

[Philip Goddard]

I want to report exactly the same problem, and it's a real nuisance because many of my large photo collection have picked up from somewhere (apparently NOT PM) crazy IPTC dates, mostly with year 2115, and I want to get all these corrected to the EXIF capture date.  PM fails to write any capture dates to the IPTC dates, either through the individual photo IPTC dialog or the stationery pad.  At the moment my only way of achieving this is individually for each photo in XnView or PixVue, but this would be far too much work and I want to be able to do this as a batch operation on my collection of now over 1,000 photos.  Although those programs do batch IPTC editing, they don't allow you to choose which IPTC fields are written in a batch operation, so that one would have all the selected photos given the same caption, objectname and keywords, which is most certainly not what I want.

I wonder if anyone knows a utility which would do this batch operation just for the date for me while I await a fix for this bug in PM.  I'm running Windows XP Pro.

[Hayo Baan]

Philip, I'm quite sure you can achieve exactly what you want with ExifTool by Phil Harvey => http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

Hope this helps,
    Hayo

[Philip Goddard]

So many thanks for that, Hayo - I've just tried Exiftool  on a test copy of my whole photo collection, simply drag/dropping the folder on a shortcut to Exiftool with the following arguments: "-DateTimeOriginal>DateCreated" -r -P (including the double quotes), and it was all done in about half a minute!  However, quite a list of warnings was displayed, and I didn't know what they meant (they may be nothing serious) so I'll examine the files in the test set before I dare do this to my original collection.

Anyway, I still sure want the bug in PM fixed.  Also that troublesome thing of the date/time field in the IPTC dialog defaulting to the current day's date when the IPTC data from one photo is copied and then pasted into the next.  There is a clear need for the user to be able to set a default for ALL IPTC data forms (including the stationery pads) to have capture date as the default.

Thanks again, Hayo, for pointing to an effective workaround while we await a fix in PM!

[Kirk Baker]

So many thanks for that, Hayo - I've just tried Exiftool  on a test copy of my whole photo collection, simply drag/dropping the folder on a shortcut to Exiftool with the following arguments: "-DateTimeOriginal>DateCreated" -r -P (including the double quotes), and it was all done in about half a minute!  However, quite a list of warnings was displayed, and I didn't know what they meant (they may be nothing serious) so I'll examine the files in the test set before I dare do this to my original collection.

Anyway, I still sure want the bug in PM fixed.  Also that troublesome thing of the date/time field in the IPTC dialog defaulting to the current day's date when the IPTC data from one photo is copied and then pasted into the next.  There is a clear need for the user to be able to set a default for ALL IPTC data forms (including the stationery pads) to have capture date as the default.

Thanks again, Hayo, for pointing to an effective workaround while we await a fix in PM!

The bug has been fixed in our upcoming 4.5.3.2 update.  If you want to contact me privately I'll get you a beta.

-Kirk

[gasakawa]

Kirk,

We were having the same problem on a Mac, where the correct capture time was not overriding the arbitrary date that PM initially applied to the images.  I'm using the latest version on a Mac version 10.5.3.  Is there any way to send email me the link to the next beta.  We were pulling our hair out because we had just started using Extensis Portfolio and noticed wrong capture dates in images we were transferring over.  We though it was an Extensis problem but now I think it's the bug you had mentioned.

Thanks!

Glenn

[Kirk Baker]

Glenn,

We were having the same problem on a Mac, where the correct capture time was not overriding the arbitrary date that PM initially applied to the images.  I'm using the latest version on a Mac version 10.5.3.  Is there any way to send email me the link to the next beta.  We were pulling our hair out because we had just started using Extensis Portfolio and noticed wrong capture dates in images we were transferring over.  We though it was an Extensis problem but now I think it's the bug you had mentioned.

You can access the latest beta here:

http://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=3075.0

If the beta does not fix your issue, then please let me know how to reproduce the problem with the 4.5.3.2 beta.

Thanks,

-Kirk