Digital photography is one of the most popular hobbies these days. Most people don’t bother too much with the settings on their camera. They just point and shoot. It can be very frustrating to realize, after the fact, that your image metadata, such as the time and date, are all incorrect because they weren’t set properly when you took the pictures.
Thankfully, in Linux it’s easy to change the date and time in your digital photos. You can even do this task batch-style, on all of your pictures at once.
pyExifToolGUI
pyExifToolGUI is a graphical frontend for ExifTool, a command-line Linux tool for editing metadata. ExifTool and Python must be installed for pyExifToolGUI to work properly in Linux. Also, you must make sure that the proper dependencies, such as python-pyside, are installed before using this utility.
To install pyExifToolGUI on Linux, download the pyExifToolGUI.tar.gz file from GitHub. Extract the file to the desired location, change to the extracted directory, then install it with the following commands:
sudo ./install_remove.py install
If you prefer, you can also run pyExifToolGUI without installing it with this command:
./bin/pyexiftoolgui
After starting the tool, click File > Load Images. Navigate to the folder with the photos you’d like to edit. CTRL-left-click each image you wish to load and press Open. Then, in the left navigation pane, CTRL-left-click each image with incorrect date and time metadata. In the right pane, click the Edit Data tab, then below it, click the Exif tab.
Under Date and Time, enter the date and time you would like the image metadata to reflect. You must enter the date and time in YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS format, or the metadata won’t be written to the photo file. For example, if the photos were taken on June 15, 2015 at 12 noon, type 2015:06:15 12:00:00. Then click the Save to Selected Images button. Do not close pyExifToolGUI or your terminal window until you’re certain that the program has finished writing the changes to your photo files.
Shotwell
Shotwell is a simple-to-use photo editing software program that comes with certain Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu. To edit the date and time of your photos in Shotwell, go to Events in the left pane, and select the photos you’d like to edit.
Then in the right pane, select the photos whose date and time you wish to change. CTRL-left-click to select the desired photos, then click Photos > Adjust Date and Time… Choose the correct date and time from the calendar and clock provided, select Shift Photos/Videos by the Same Amount, Set All Photos/Videos to this Time, and Modify Original File, then click OK.
If you use Shotwell to change the date and time on your photos, some of the Exif metadata fields may remain unchanged. To have greater control over the Exif metadata in your photos, be sure to use pyExifToolGUI.
Additional Reading:
Shutter: Screenshot Software for Linux
Configure XScreenSaver to Display the Day, Date, and Time