scanning pics into iPhoto with customized date

[ChromePlanet]

I am starting a huge project of collecting all of my family's photos in iPhoto. Sources include various digital cameras (JPEG) and scanned prints of photos (TIFF). (I chose TIFF for maximum uncompressed quality while editing and re-saving.) I want them to all line up in order of date the photos were taken once inside iPhoto.

iPhoto imports photos and time-stamps them according to embedded exif date/time or file date/time, I forget which. But it won't let you modify either and neither will OSX. I hunted for a good photo manager that could modify both JPEG and TIFF files -- their exif info and their filesystem timestamps -- and found ACDSee to be the best and easiest. Except it's Windows only. So I used it over a network on my Mac photo files and it worked great, except it changed the TIFF files to PC byte order. No problem for iPhoto, but OSX won't display thumbnails or previews of TIFF files in PC byte order. And I really want to keep all my work on the Mac anyway.

So I guess what I need is a good Mac program that can modify the exif metadata in TIFF and JPEG files as well as the OS timestamps. I would prefer it have batch functionality as well as context-sensitive control-click functionality added on to the Finder.

So many photo pros use a Mac, so I am wondering why it is so hard to find such a program.

[mslifkin]

Originally Posted by ChromePlanet

I am starting a huge project of collecting all of my family's photos in iPhoto. Sources include various digital cameras (JPEG) and scanned prints of photos (TIFF). (I chose TIFF for maximum uncompressed quality while editing and re-saving.) I want them to all line up in order of date the photos were taken once inside iPhoto.

iPhoto imports photos and time-stamps them according to embedded exif date/time or file date/time, I forget which. But it won't let you modify either and neither will OSX. I hunted for a good photo manager that could modify both JPEG and TIFF files -- their exif info and their filesystem timestamps -- and found ACDSee to be the best and easiest. Except it's Windows only. So I used it over a network on my Mac photo files and it worked great, except it changed the TIFF files to PC byte order. No problem for iPhoto, but OSX won't display thumbnails or previews of TIFF files in PC byte order. And I really want to keep all my work on the Mac anyway.

So I guess what I need is a good Mac program that can modify the exif metadata in TIFF and JPEG files as well as the OS timestamps. I would prefer it have batch functionality as well as context-sensitive control-click functionality added on to the Finder.

So many photo pros use a Mac, so I am wondering why it is so hard to find such a program.

Check out Graphic Converter. It comes with every Mac, is shareware, and will do exactly what you need it to do.

Regards,
Marc

[chornbe]

And if you want to do it in batch mode at the command line (if GraphicConverter can't do that), shoot me an email. A buddy of mine has some perl scripts that do it. He had to write them because his digicam kept losing the current date and a lot of his pics were misdated.

[ChromePlanet]

Hmm. GraphicConverter did not come on my iBook G4, purchased in January. A look at the features list on the author's site does not indicate that it can do any of the things I need:

1. edit EXIF info in JPG and TIFF files
2. change OS file timestamps
3. context-sensitive Finder functionality

A program called EXIFutils will do it all. But it's command-line only and has a very steep learning curve.