Digital Light & Color

I'm confused about timestamps. There are:

1. Modify and Create dates in Browse sort
2. Created date in Image Properties (Original Exposure)
3. Created and Modified dates in Image Properties (File Information)
4. Create date in User Comments
5. Date displayed under the thumbnail in Browse
6. Create and Modify dates (and their components) in Save widget Macro
7. Date in RAW Dialog/Properties

So there is at least 10 different dates in 7 places that display various dates (or use them to sort images in Browse)

Could someone unconfuse me about at least two things:

1) which or those 10 are are the same (i.e. read from the same source (just going by different names), and which source)?
2) where are all these dates kept and read from (e.g. I understand that at least one date, EXIF create?, is created by the camera and kept in EXIF metadata within the image file). But which of the dates above read EXIF? and how about other dates (Create(d) and Modify(ied)): are they kept with the files or kept in some disk/partition file system table outside of the actual file? What happens to the dates (other then EXIF) when a file gets copied to another disk?

Cheers!

maybe a look at
http://www.dl-c.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=875
confuses you even more.
There is not a standard for the handling of metadata.
There are hundreds ... :)
exiftool is a good starting point to get some feeling what is contained in the metadata.

Maciej,

The "created" date in Image Properties - Original exposure is the EXIF - Create date
The "created" and "modified" date in Image Properties - File Information are the Windows File dates (can be shown in Windows Explorer - right click on the file - Properties)
Under User Comments is the EXIF - Create date.
The date shown in Browser in the Windows File modified date.
In Macro the %createdate% is the EXIF create date, the %modifydate% is the windows file modified date.
The date in the RAW-Dialog looks to be the EXIF create date, too.

The EXIF create date is stored in the file, the Windows File dates are stored in the File Allocation Tabe on a FAT formatted drive, of in the corresponding place on a NTFS drive.
Copying a file does not change any of the dates.

When dealing with ExifTools it's a great help to use a GUI frontend as for example ExifToolGUI. It gives the command line tool a Windows program feel and usability.
(My computer life started with DOS 3.3 on a 80286 processor, so I should be used with command line, but hey, one gets older and lazier ... ;) )

Hope I did not inrease the confusion.

Dieter's list is correct. I can add one thing: when sorting images by create date, the EXIF create date is used. However if there is no EXIF create date, then the Windows file create date is used instead. The same is true of the create date produced by the macro.

Generally speaking, only images that originated from a digital camera have EXIF create dates. Scanned images, images that resulted from a copy and paste generally do not have EXIF dates. Of course images whose EXIF data has been stripped also do not have them. (The reason we added an EXIF date editing feature is to allow the user to add dates to photographs that have been scanned. This would presumably be the date the photo was shot, not the date it was scanned.)

Kiril

Many thanks, Dieter and Kiril! Makes sense to me now.

One question for Kiril in the light of Kiril's comment that Browse can already sort files by an EXIF field if it's there (the EXIF Create Date): would it be potentially possible and useful for others to add sort by ISO to Browse options?

Although it can be argued that there are many other EXIF fields that could be potentially added to the Browse sort options, and that this may be ultimately impractical, separating files by ISO is the one that I find most consequential in the way I batch process them.

I suppose a simple sort would not be enough, how would you know where the last image with let's say ISO 400 is and where the first with ISO 800?
Maybe it could be possible to mark all images with a certain ISO Value in the Workflow-window itself?

With ExifToolGUI it is possible to reset the Windows-file-modified date to the image create date from the EXIF field.
So, after making changes to the EXIF or IPTC data (which changes to windows modified date) it is possible to reset it.

Dieter,

True, simple sort may not be the best, but I think it could be quite an improvement in my ability to find images by ISO within PWP. One could check when one ISO value ends and another begins, checking the Properties by trial and error. This is somewhat similar to sorting by extension as a way of separating e.g. JPGs from TIFFS (except it's a bit easier since the file name is displayed right under the thumbnail, and there is no need to check the properties).

I think I might have mentioned it elsewhere, but I think it would be awesome (for the reason above and other reasons) if the Properties window had some sort of way of moving to the next/previous image without having to close it.

Marking or selecting the images by ISO in a workflow would be even more awesome... I can't find it anymore, but I think I even once proposed an idea of introducing ISO filtering in NR/sharpening widgets (akin the old RAWShooter Essentials, if I recall correctly), but that was probably too complex to implement.

Just thinking, maybe it would be a good solution to display the sort criterium below the image in the browser.
We have 2 dates now for sorting, create and modified, the corresponding date could be shown in the date field.
And for ISO I would suggest to show it instead of the MB and pixel size, to deal with noise reduction happens in almost any case with images directly from camera, either RAW or JPEG, so i would think the size information is the less important.

Dieter Mayr wrote: ...And for ISO I would suggest to show it instead of the MB and pixel size, to deal with noise reduction happens in almost any case with images directly from camera, either RAW or JPEG, so i would think the size information is the less important.

My image file organization is such that a folder will contain one or more RAW file and its subsequent version tiffs or jpegs sets where 'crop for composition' has been performed or a re-sized for the web version created or re-sized for desk-top background version created... ...so for me, when using PWP's Browser, the 'pixel size' is convenient to differentiate which version I am viewing when using the thumbnail image for workflow or workspace selection.

If of interest, there are two ways to add 'Exif:ISO' to an image's system 'FileName' as a prefix using Exiftool/ExiftoolGUI ['800'_IMG_xxxx.CR2 or 800_IMG_xxxx.CR2, for example] but as previously posted in another thread, my preference is to sort images by their ISO into folders rather than change their FileName...

...den...

den wrote:My image file organization is such that a folder will contain one or more RAW file and its subsequent version tiffs or jpegs sets where 'crop for composition' has been performed or a re-sized for the web version created or re-sized for desk-top background version created... ...so for me, when using PWP's Browser, the 'pixel size' is convenient to differentiate which version I am viewing when using the thumbnail image for workflow or workspace selection...

Den,
With your organisation scheme you would not have much need for sorting by ISO, would you ?
My thoughts were about replacing the Size-Info just and only when sorting by ISO (or even not replacing it, if there is enough space to show the ISO value somewhere).
If ISO sorting should be possible in a future version there should be some possibility to show the ISO value directly in browser to be able to use it effectevly (for example when doing workflow noise reduction).
I have my RAWs in a folder structure YYYY_MM_DD_Event and the processed images (and the masks belonging to them) in a separate folder structure.