Modify EXIF timestamp of JPEG images

F-spot has a nice feature to browse your photo gallery by some sort of a time-histogram control. This is very handy if you know the date of a specific picture, you’re looking for. But this feature does not help if the EXIF timestamp of the pictures is just plain wrong (which often happens with “old” pictures, i.e. end of 90’s). So I was looking for a way to change the EXIF timestamp of such photos. jhead solves this problem quite nicely (the application is available from the Ubuntu repositories).

Assume in the current directory all pictures are dated 2036:11:06, instead of 2001:11:05, we can then modify the timestamp with a simple:

jhead -da2001:11:05-2036:11:06 *

What makes more sense for the example above is:

jhead -ts2001:11:05-00:00:00 *

Here no time difference computations are involved.

So now the information shown in f-spot reflects the real date, cool!

Update: If the images do not have a EXIF header, one can use the “transplant” function to copy the exif header from another image:

jhead -te image_with_exif.jpg *

Update 2: To rename (more specific number) the pictures inside of a directory, one can use:

jhead -nf%03i *

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 7:46 pm and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.