Bridge to Nowhere…
I just got back from a cycling trip in Spain. I was there for 11 days, rode 412 miles through the mountains and plains (they’re wrong about the rain in Spain falling mainly on the plain, by the way), stayed in 5 cities or towns (and passed through many more), climbed many thousands of feet including some of the most difficult climbs in Europe…
Oh, and I took 2,148 photos (1,288 RAW with my DSLR and 857 JPG with my point-and-shoot), as well as 117 video clips.
Which brings me to a new Pet Peeve (a popular feature in my latest book, Take Your Best Shot).
Now, I’ll admit right from the start that my current frustration is really my fault. You see, my digital SLR was set to my home time zone in Seattle. And my point-and-shoot digital camera was set to the east coast from a recent trip there. So they were each set to different time zones, and neither of them was set to the correct time zone for Spain.
Granted, it really isn’t the end of the world for the capture time to not reflect the “real” time when the picture was taken, at least in most cases. I mean, if I have a picture taken in a plaza at night after dinner at the metadata indicates it was taken at 8am, that’s really not a big deal, right? It would be nice if the data were accurate, but I can live with it.
But the bigger issue in this case is that the date and time for photos from my two cameras were out of sync. So when I would browse the RAWs and JPEGs together, they wouldn’t match up. Pictures I took while riding my bike (with my point-and-shoot) would be mixed in with pictures I took before or after the ride with my DSLR. This gets to be really annoying.
At this point you’re probably thinking, “Hey, Tim, why don’t you just adjust the capture date and time using any of the many utilities that exist for this very purpose?”. Well, I did. And that worked great. Until I tried to browse those photos with Adobe Bridge.
And so now (finally), I get to the new Pet Peeve.
Adobe Bridge is a great tool for browsing your photos, and even allows some basic organizational work. I generally use it as my first tool for sorting through my photos. But one big shortcoming for Adobe Bridge is the limitations on how you can sort your photos. Naturally you can sort by Filename. You can even sort by File Size, Rating, Document Type, or Label. And while it doesn’t prove all that useful for most users, you can even sort by Color Profile or Resolution.
And yet, you can’t sort by the EXIF capture date. Sure, you can sort by the file creation or modification dates, but those are different. If you change your EXIF capture date with one of the many utilities available, the file creation and modification dates won’t reflect that new date. Only the EXIF metadata will.
And Adobe Bridge doesn’t allow you to sort by EXIF capture date. Crazy. And deserving of Pet Peeve status. Let’s hope Adobe will fix this in an update. Soon.
In the meantime I’ll try to be sure to never forget to change the date/time setting on my cameras when I go to a different time zone. Because Adobe Bridge isn’t very forgiving when I make that mistake…
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September 24th, 2008 at 6:49 am
I assume that you are aware of the many tools out there that will allow you to change the file date and time, including some that will read the EXIF date and apply that to the file date.
I recently needed a command line tool to do that and downloaded something called EXIFtools. It worked great but I’m sure that there are Windows and Mac GUI based tools available as well that will do the same thing.
I think that EXIFtools even allows you to change both the EXIF date and the file date at the same time so you can do it in one step…
September 24th, 2008 at 6:52 am
I am familiar with those tools indeed. But that doesn’t excuse Adobe Bridge for not being able to sort images by EXIF capture time!
September 24th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Of course you are right, and I hope Adobe is listening, but this will help you get out of a bind…
September 24th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Is you problem corrected in CS4 version of Bridge?
September 25th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I’ve run into this same exact problem with bridge. My solution? Use Lightroom. In fact I don’t use BR or PS for much of anything anymore. Nonetheless, LR’s time zone adjust tool has saved my butt more than once… and it (so far) has worked flawlessly for me.
October 12th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Unfortunately the last prerelease build of bridge that I saw only had sort by date created and date modified
October 14th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
How do I sort in Adobe Bridge by time. I am new to Bridge and would greatly appreciated a stp by step in how to do this. I did a wedding last weekend with 3 photographers and 5 cameras and as you can imagine without knowing how to fuse these files together by time created it will be a mess. Thank you in advance for the input.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Take a tip from aviation. One way to overcome the problem is to use CUT (Coordinated Universal Time, AKA Zulu or Greenwich Time). Local time for any zone is computed by subtracting the difference (a constant) from CUT. For example Alaska Standard Time is ZULU -9 and ADT is ZULU -10. CUT is 24 hour time. If the camera does not provide for a 24 hour setting use 12:00 midnight as 00:00 CUT.
Using CUT eliminates the need to change time when changing zones so if your camera records location you can sort by location and time.
If you don’t want to bother with CUT an alternative is to set all cameras to your local time and keep that setting. You are unlikely to take two images at the same time in different time zones so you can sort by local time and use the difference from your local time as the correction constant. I also recommend not changing the time setting for DST (one less thing to remember).