Solved Can I remove date tags from photos/vids ?

[rufford155]

The dates on all my photos & videos are wrong! This is more than likely because the dates on my cameras are wrong and I never get round to checking/correcting them.
This can be confusing for me and more so for anyone I send them to or share them with.
I've tried changing some in Windows Photo Gallery but it's just not feasible for 100's of files.
What I'd like to do is just remove the date/time tags completely or set them all to a null value.
(I know the dates roughly anyway as they are kept in yearly folders).
Does anyone know a simple way to do this?
Thanks.

 

[D3LL]

I don't think this is possible. Once the image is taken on the camera and date and time stamp is posted on the photo. The only way would be to photoshop this out however this is VERY time consuming.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I don't think this is possible. Once the image is taken on the camera and date and time stamp is posted on the photo. The only way would be to photoshop this out however this is VERY time consuming.

Not all cameras post a time and date on the photo and most cameras can be set to not do so (I've done that with every camera I've owned because I detest having the picture ruined with the time and date stamp printed on the picture itself). Almost all cameras will tag the photo with the time and date and this can be viewed in the Properties and, if desired, edited.

 

[DickK]

Yes, it's possible but you'll need some third party software to manipulate the date-taken tags. There are many image management applications that do the job, for instance Adobe PhotoShop Elements has Organizer bundled in it that will set the metadata to whatever you want. IrfanView (freebie) has a lot of ways to modify the metadata as well. However, if you don't set the camera date correctly you're not going to know when it was taken so I don't see how changing the metadata is going be of much good to you. Take 2 minutes and go set the camera(s) properly and save yourself a lot of headache later.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Yes, it's possible but you'll need some third party software to manipulate the date-taken tags...

Not necessarily. As long as the time/date stamp isn't shown on the picture itself, all one needs to do is right click on the picture, click on properties, then click on the Details tab. Click on the data that needs changing (the actual data, not the heading on the left) and make the needed changes. I often add comments about the photo.

 

[rufford155]

Hi there and thanks for your responses.
There's nothing on the photos themselves, it's only the tags (metadata) I want to get rid of.
DickK > I'm not bothered 'cos I know near enough when/where they were taken - after all, I was there!
The trouble is that cameras nowadays are like Microsoft Office - 90% of what they can do I'll never use so I can't be bothered to RTFM. And I reckon the date changes when I take the battery out so it's just a nuisance to me really. But I'll have alook at IrfanView so thanks for that.
Lady Fitzgerald > Yes I know I can change them individually but, as I said, I've got hundreds so I'm hoping to find something that will work en masse.

 

[rufford155]

Solution found I hope

Well, I should have done this first probably - a simple Google search found these first two entries.
Batch Purifier LITE by Digital Confidence.
Easy Exif Delete by ConsumerSoft
I'll try one or both of these and update the thread.
Learnt 3 important things while reading about this subject :-
1) If you upload your photos to social networks or share on cloud services, all the metadata goes with them. There's an awful lot of info included which could in some circumstances compromise your security.
2) Metadata exists on virtually every file you produce on your PC, not just photos.
3) It is apparently illegal to remove the metadata from files you have downloaded from somewhere else.

 

[DickK]

3) It is apparently illegal to remove the metadata from files you have downloaded from somewhere else.

Sorta true, sorta not. On photographs, it's common for a photographer to embed a copyright statement in the metadata. It's not much protection for that purpose but it's at least something to inform honest folks that someone has a claim on that image. Similar things can be done with other files to indicate ownership or whatever. There's no law I know of that says you can't remove/alter the metadata but it might add up to that in some cases--and depending on why you did it. What you aren't supposed to is remove a copyright notice (in any form) or alter the file in such a way as to then claim ownership of it. That's an infringement of the actual owner's rights. In general, anything you download belongs to someone whether you know who or not and unless they've given some or all of their rights to you (Creative Commons licensing is a common way to do that), then you need to be careful just what you do with the file. You are 100% correct about the metadata in images and other files that get shared. There's may a lot of information in there--most of it entirely harmless but some may not be. Few people think about that but they should.

 

[rufford155]

Here's an update as promised.
Firstly I found you can use the right-click context menu Properties > Details Tab > Remove Properties and Personal Information and choose 'Create a copy with all possible properties removed'.
This did not remove very much but it did remove Date Taken which was what I wanted.
But you can only do one file at a time with this method so not very practical.
So I installed and ran 'BatchPurifierLITE' from Digital Confidence.
This removed a bit more than before - again including Date Taken - and, as the name implies, you can do a whole lot of files together.
The stuff then remaining consists of the Image Properties (for jpg's) such as dimensions, resolution, etc and the File Properties such as name, type, size, etc. This is stuff generated, I think, by Windows on the PC rather than by the device that took the photo and includes Date Created and Date Modified.
Unfortunately, in Windows Live Photo Gallery, Date Created then appears as 'Date Taken' so the confusion I was hoping to avoid when sharing the file with others might not be eliminated.
So finally I had a look at the photos that I have stored (and I've shared) on SkyDrive.
These have not taken much data with them, some of the image and file properties but not Date Taken, even from the originals, only Date Modified so that's not as bad as I thought it might be.
But I'd prefer Date Modified not to be there as I don't see what use it is to anybody really.
Sometimes computer systems do things just because they can, not because they are actually needed !