[KPhotoAlbum] Organize by creation date instead of modified date?

[jedd]

On Tue Feb 3 2009, Murray Strome wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:02:37 -0800 (PST) Murray Strome wrote:
> Is it possible to have photos organized by the date/time on which the
> photos were taken/created?? Currently, the times used seem to be the
> date/time on which
> the photos were last modified. Since I usually do some editing of the
> photos after I have transferred them to my computer, this creates
> difficulty in having them organized by the actual time they were
> created.

 Hi Murray,

 This may be more a workflow problem than a technical one.  Here's
 what I do to work around the problem you are having.

 First, photos that come off the camera are either dumped into my
 normal picture hierarchy and *never touched again*, or they are
 dumped somewhere temporary where I then cull or make changes
 (though actual changes are rare).  I clean up exif date, orientation,
 and file metadata (date stamp) and then migrate into my normal
 picture hierarchy and run KPA to pick up the new images.

 Consequently it's very rare that my three EXIF dates are ever out
 of alignment.  I think the problem someone else will probably
 mention is that EXIF date stamps (and I think there can be many)
 are not standardised, consequently it's hard to programmatically
 identify which is the 'real' date out of the bunch that exist.  So
 a further consequence is that KPA just grabs the first date field
 it finds and takes that as canon.  It just so happens that the
 'Date modified' field is often the first, sadly.  This also explains
 why you're unlikely to get the option within KPA to sort on one
 particular date field rather than another - it's just too tricky to
 write some code that would respect all camera's EXIF fields.  And
 then you have the problem of handling pictures that have only
 one or two of the three (usual) date fields.


 Now, with the way I handle my pictures, each set gets put under
 a dir-structure of pictures/year/iso8601date/ - and under *that*
 directory I may have, at any time in the future, several sub-dirs
 such as 'panorama' or 'wallpaper' or 'modified', and that's where
 changed pictures get *copied* to.  My workflow is to do this while
 KPA is not running, and to tidy up the new image by using something
 like exifcopy to replicate the full EXIF data from my never-touched
 source image to this new image.


 So .. to cut a long story short [isn't my style ;) ]

 1.
 I'd suggest you have a few options.  Either do all your modifications
 to new files only (I think the easiest and best approach) and then
 replicate the EXIF data from the originals before firing up KPA.

 2.
 Or do your modifications before you introduce the files into KPA.
 This would mean you'd have to fix up the exif data - but there
 are plenty of tools out there that can do exif shuffling (say copy
 create date over modified date) before running KPA again.  This
 may be easier if you have a staging area for new photos.  I think
 this would work okay, but it's a lot more work.

 3.
 Use some exif / script magic - write a script that will go through
 your entire photo collection and copy the exif date for 'create'
 over the exif date for 'modified'.  You'll have to be very careful
 with this, especially if you have photos from more than one camera
 model.  Backups are strongly recommended.  Once done, re-run KPA,
 which will want to re-generate a lot of MD5's, but then you can
 do the maintenance | acquire file meta-data - and be sure to leave
 ticked ONLY the exif-date information.  Then select all your pictures 
 and re-sort them (View | Sort by date).   This approach would work,
 but has some risk (exif fields being inconsistent) and needs to be
 part of your workflow whenever you modify your originals again.

 Hmm .. someone wanna paste this into the FAQ?  ;)

 J.