Changing “DateTaken” of a photo

Question

I just came back from a trip to the US, and after editing all the photos, I noticed that the camera used the Israeli time zone, and not the american. There is a 7 hours time

Answer 1

The simplest way I've found is using technic described here and System.Drawing.Bitmap;

The code should be like this:

  public void ChangeDateTaken(string path)
    {
        Image theImage = new Bitmap(path);
        PropertyItem[] propItems = theImage.PropertyItems;
        Encoding _Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
        var DataTakenProperty1 = propItems.Where(a => a.Id.ToString("x") == "9004").FirstOrDefault();
        var DataTakenProperty2 = propItems.Where(a => a.Id.ToString("x") == "9003").FirstOrDefault();
        string originalDateString = _Encoding.GetString(DataTakenProperty1.Value);
        originalDateString = originalDateString.Remove(originalDateString.Length - 1);
        DateTime originalDate = DateTime.ParseExact(originalDateString, "yyyy:MM:dd HH:mm:ss", null);

        originalDate = originalDate.AddHours(-7);


        DataTakenProperty1.Value = _Encoding.GetBytes(originalDate.ToString("yyyy:MM:dd HH:mm:ss") + '\0');
        DataTakenProperty2.Value = _Encoding.GetBytes(originalDate.ToString("yyyy:MM:dd HH:mm:ss") + '\0');
        theImage.SetPropertyItem(DataTakenProperty1);
        theImage.SetPropertyItem(DataTakenProperty2);
        string new_path = System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(path) + "\\_" + System.IO.Path.GetFileName(path);
        theImage.Save(new_path);
        theImage.Dispose();
    }

Don't forget to add System.Drawing assembly. Also you will probably need to adjust DateTime format to your culture, if needed

Answer 2

Not exactly a programming solution, but you can use exiftool. I use it for this exact purpose.

Date/Time Shift Feature

Have you ever forgotten to set the date/time on your digital camera before taking a bunch of pictures? ExifTool has a time shift feature that makes it easy to apply a batch fix to the timestamps of the images (eg. change the "Date Picture Taken" reported by Windows Explorer). Say for example that your camera clock was reset to 2000:01:01 00:00:00 when you put in a new battery at 2005:11:03 10:48:00. Then all of the pictures you took subsequently have timestamps that are wrong by 5 years, 10 months, 2 days, 10 hours and 48 minutes. To fix this, put all of the images in the same directory ("DIR") and run exiftool:

> exiftool "-DateTimeOriginal+=5:10:2 10:48:0" DIR

You can also set the TimeZoneOffset field, in case there's ever software that actually uses it.

Answer 3

For .NET Core I used NuGet package ExifLibNet (https://github.com/oozcitak/exiflibrary)

PM> Install-Package ExifLibNet

// using ExifLibrary;

var file = ImageFile.FromFile(filename);
file.Properties.Set(ExifTag.DateTimeDigitized, dateTime);
file.Properties.Set(ExifTag.DateTimeOriginal, dateTime);
file.Save(filename);