What is AR's "Date Taken"?

Kim,

This could be a very long post to include all the data/evidence, but it's late and for simplicity:

Exif can be a minefield, but I believe Exif fundamentally has 3 DateTimes:

Date Original
Date Digitized
Date Modified (sometimes called Date Time, all very confusing).

Assume all 3 are set the same. With AR's settings set to "Date Taken", AR will present the correct time for "Date Taken".

If I re-create the Exif thumbnail, for instance, a change is only made to the Exif Date Modified, as expected.

However, AR shows this new, modified date in "Date Taken". Clearly, this is incorrect.

If I change the settings to "Date Original", then "Date Taken" reverts back to the correct value, as stored in Exif's Date Original.

The name "Date Taken" makes sense, but in the Exif world, Date Original represents the moment an image was taken. I think it should be picking up this value rather than the Date Modified.

Regards,

Mark

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Reply to #1:
Kim,

Ref an old post https://www.advancedrenamer.com/forum_thread?for um_id=174

"I try to compensate for time zones and daylight saving times". I'm not sure if this is still implemented, but is probably not a good thing to do.

A really good read on this is http://www.metadataworkinggroup.org/pdf/mwg_gui dance.pdf

A key section is:

5.3 Date/Time
There's a lot of confusion about date/time handling. In addition to a variety of date/time values stored within a file's metadata, creation and modification values are also stored by the file system - both the computer's file system and that of a camera's media card.

In general, date/time metadata is being used to describe the following scenarios:

* Date/time original specifies when a photo was taken
* Date/time digitized specifies when an image was digitized
* Date/time modified specifies when a file was modified by the user

Date/time original and date/time digitized are usually added by the devices (cameras, scanners, etc.) but in other scenarios the user needs to define these values manually. This can happen, for example, if an old photograph is scanned-in (digitized) and the user wishes to specify in the metadata the date the original photo was taken. The date/time modified value will be changed by software and operating systems on subsequent edits of the file.

This document focuses on the date/time original value, since that is generally the most important aspect for the consumer.

Mark

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