Export movie dates

[Steve Loeppky]

Hello,

First off, Phoshare absolutely dominates.  Thanks for creating such a wonderful tool.

The only issue I have had is when an album/event that I'm exporting contains movies whose dates have been shifted in iPhoto.  It appears that iPhoto stores this shifted date in its own metadata.  This doesn't get carried forward when doing a Phoshare export.  I suspect this is because there isn't a standard for movie metadata across movie formats.  It seems like the default that iPhoto and Picassa use is the creation date for the file.  Would it be possible for exported movies to look for the iPhoto metadata creation date and then set the creation date for the exported movie file to be this date?  This would be very useful as it would enable the movies taken on my point-and-shoot camera to align correctly chronologically with the photos I've taken.

Thanks and let me know if there are questions about this,

Steve

[Tilman Sporkert]

Steve,

 no, movies generally have no meta data to track dates. Phoshare currently doesn't really process the dates at all, but instead relies on iPhoto to maintain data changes in the files (always use the "Modify Original File" option whenever you change a date). For movies, no modification is made to the file, so the edit is getting lost during an export with Phoshare.

  If you are using Picasa, you can change the movie data after exporting using Tools -> Adjust Date and Time. Just like iPhoto, this edit is only tracked in the Picasa database, and the file is not modified.

Tilman

--
Tilman Sporkert   (til...@sporkert.com)

[Steve Loeppky]

Hi Tilman,

Thanks for the explanation.  It sounds like there's an opportunity for another tool here: "sync iPhoto movie file creation dates to the date in the iPhoto database".  Is this on the Phoshare roadmap?  If not, do you have any suggestions for making it happen?  Would it be wise to leverages some of the Python utility code you've written, or is there another open-source package that would make this easy?

Thanks,

Steve

[Eric Lee]

This is a bit of an old thread, but I am seeing a similar issue, which I guess is a bug in iPhoto 9.4.2 (and perhaps is what Esteban was seeing).  

If I edit the date of a movie (from my iPhone) in iPhoto, and "Modify original files", then export using phoshare the file seems to have the adjusted date.  

But, if I do the same thing for movies from my Panasonic DMC-ZS3 camera, iPhoto shows the "new" adjusted date, but the phoshare export has the OLD date.  

It looks like the file stored in the iPhoto Library app bundle also has the OLD file date, i.e. it didn't really update the original file?  Or it updates metadata for the original file (but not the file date) that is ignored when exporting?  

I guess I will have to find the movies from this camera in picasa, and fix the date there again.  

Thanks for phoshare, though, it seems to be exporting the descriptions from iPhoto like I wanted!

Eric

[Tilman]

If you rely on the file creation time to track the capture time, you will have a lot of problems... the real capture time is stored in meta data inside the file. Many photo management tools don't even try to preserve the file creation time. Edit a file, and save it as a copy, and you get a new file, with todays creation time. When a photo management tools displays the capture time, it reads that from the meta data inside the file, not the file creation date! 

iPhoto stores all edits in its own database, without ever modifying the original files. The only exception is the capture time - if you enable "Modify orginal file", it will *try* to update the capture time in the *meta data* of the original file. This does not always work - the file might be read only, or the file format might not support setting a capture time in the meta data. 

None of this works well with movies, as most movie containers don't have metadata for capture times, or the programs you work with don't know how to read and write these data. So they tend to just update their own databases, and leave the files alone. Which means that the edits are lost when you export the movies.

Tilman