Forget to Set the Time on your Camera? Picasa can Fix That!

We took a trip to England a couple of months ago and I took lots of pictures, some with my Canon digital SLR and others with my Samsung Galaxy S5 phone. The phone is always set to the right time, because it is location aware. It knew we were in a different time zone than what we left and it’s time was correct. The Canon on the other hand was still set to US Eastern time zone (5 hours earlier) and I didn’t think about that until nearly a week had passed. When I did think of it, (thank you Phil for reminding me!), I changed the time settings in my camera so it was correct.

When I look at my pictures, I want to see all of them – phone and camera pictures – in sequence. But, for those first few days, a picture taken during the afternoon with the camera would come before a picture taken at breakfast with the phone. See my problem? The camera photos were 5 hours earlier than the phone pictures taken at the same time. There are many places where you can sort pictures by date, so it would help if that ‘photo taken’ date was correct. Picasa can do that for you!

Picasa has a feature on the Tools menu called Adjust Date and Time. I use it all the time to change the date of scanned photos. I may snap a picture of an old family photo from the 1960s, but the picture will use the current date for it’s date taken because, well, that’s when I snapped the current picture! I can use Tools->Adjust Date and Time to set the date taken to something in the 1960s! See this past article on Scanning and Organizing Old Photos. We even use this technique for scanning slides.

Today I discovered that Picasa’s Adjust Date and Time feature can even compensate for my time zone faux pas.

1. Select multiple pictures. I can even filter to just those pictures taken with the Canon by typing Canon in search, then select all pictures for the date range in question
2. Tools->Adjust Date and Time and add 5 hours (or whatever you need) to the New photo date.
   Be sure to check “Adjust all photo dates by the amount” and click OK.
   
   Notice that I am adjusting the time for 404 pictures!

Now, you may wonder if even the new time is correct because it seems to be saying that we’re out sightseeing at 5 o’clock in the morning! Well, I learned another thing here. Time is actually recorded relative to GMT time, so the time displayed always takes into account the time zone on the computer you are viewing with.