TOPIC: DIGITAL CAMERA
Restoring photo dates with ExifTool after an Olympus camera loses its settings following a complete battery discharge
24th November 2025Here is the story behind what I am sharing here. My Olympus OM-D E-M10 II had been left aside for long enough to allow its battery to discharge fully. That also had the effect of causing it to lose its date and time settings. Then, I recharged the battery and went about using it without checking on those date and time settings. The result was a set of photos with a capture date and time of 1970-01-01T00:00 (midnight on New Year's Day in 1970!).
This was noticed when I loaded them onto my computer for appraisal with Lightroom. Thankfully, this had not gone on for too long, so I could work out the dates on which the images had been made. Thus, I could use ExifTool to update the capture dates while leaving the times alone. A command like the following will accomplish this while overwriting the images (the originals were retained elsewhere).
exiftool -overwrite_original \
-DateTimeOriginal='2025:06:02 ${DateTimeOriginal;s/^.* //}' \
-CreateDate='2025:06:02 ${CreateDate;s/^.* //}' \
-ModifyDate='2025:06:02 ${ModifyDate;s/^.* //}' \
*.ORF
The above command updates the original date, the capture date and the modified date. In practice, I only set two of these, leaving aside the modified date. Omitting the -overwrite_original switch would cause the creation of backup files, should that be what you require. Some think that specifying the *.ORF wildcard search is not desirable, preferring the following instead:
exiftool -overwrite_original \
-DateTimeOriginal='2025:06:02 ${DateTimeOriginal;s/^.* //}' \
-ext orf .
It is the -ext switch that picks up the ORF extension while . refers to the folder in which you are located in your shell session, and you can define your own path in the place of the dot if that is what is needed. Also, using -ext orf -ext dng will allow you to work with more than one file type at a time, a handy thing when more than one is found in the same directory, not that I organise my files like that.
With the date metadata fixed, removing the affected photos from Lightroom and reimporting them brought in the altered metadata. In the future, I will pay more attention to the Y/M/D display on the camera when it starts up, now that I realise what the display is trying to tell me. Then involves a trip to the settings using the Menu button on the back of the camera. Once in there, navigating to the spanner icon and then to the clock one gets you to the time settings where you can adjust it as needed. Pressing OK commits the setting to memory for the future, and you are then ready to go.
While on the subject of settings, the Info button is where you can set the levels to appear in the image display (on the viewfinder in my case); somehow I managed to lose these until I recalled how to get them back. Next on the list is another button that needs care on the top of the camera near the shutter release: one with a magnifying glass icon on there: this is the electronic zoom that has caught me out in the past. Naturally, other exposure settings dials also need care too, so it is never a good idea to rush the operation of a modern digital camera. Keeping their batteries charged will help too, especially in avoiding the predicament whose resolution led to the writing of this piece.
Three gone...
11th January 2013As of today, Jessops no longer continues to trade. It is but a third specialist purveyor of photographic equipment to go this way. Jacobs, another Leicester headquartered competitor, met the same fate as did the Wildings chain in the northwest of England. These were smaller operations than Jessops who may have overreached itself during the boom years and certainly had their share of financial troubles in recent times, the latest of which putting an end from the operation.
Many are pondering what is happening, and the temptation is to blame the rise of the e-commerce and the economic situation for all of this. In addition, I have seen poor service blamed. However, where are we going to go now after this? Has photography become such a specialised market that you need a diversified business to stick with it? After all, independent retailers have been taking a hammering too and some have gone out of business, like the chains that I have mentioned here.
It does raise the question as to where folk engaging in a photographic purchase are going to go for advice now; is the web sufficiently beginner-friendly? There seemingly will be fewer bricks and mortar shops out there for anyone, so coming across one-to-one advice as once would have been the case is looking harder than it once was. Photographic magazines will help, and the web has a big role to play too. It certainly informed some of my previous purchases, but I have been that little bit more serious about my photography for a while now.
It might be that photography is becoming more specialist again after a period when the advent of digital cameras caused an explosion in interest. Cameras on mobile phones are becoming ever more capable and cannibalising the compact camera market for those only interested in point and shoot machinery. Maybe that is where things are going in that mass market photography doesn't offer the future that it once might have done given the speed of technological advance. The future and present undoubtedly are about as interesting as they have become utterly uncertain.
Thinking over the last ten years or so, there has been a lot of change and that seems set to continue, even if I am left wondering if photography has shot its bolt by now. My first SLR came from a Stockport branch of Jessops and was a film camera, a Canon EOS SLR. It certainly got me going and was exchanged for a Canon EOS 30 from Ffordes, an internet transaction during which the phone system around Manchester and Cheshire went on the blink. That outage may have exposed a frailty of our networked world, but there has been no fire to melt cables in a tunnel since then. Further items from Jessops came via the same channel, such as a Manfrotto 055 tripod and my Pentax K10D. A Canon-fit 28-135 mm Sigma came from Jessops' then Manchester Deansgate store and another Canon-fit Sigma lens, a 70-300 mm telephoto affair, came from another branch of the chain, although not the Macclesfield branch since that had yet to be established and there's no photographic store left in the town now after the Jessops and Wildings closures.
Those purchases have become history, just like the photographic retail chain from which they were sourced. These days, I am more than comfortable with making dealings over the web, but that concern about those starting out that I expressed earlier now remains. Seeing how that would work is set to become interesting. Might it limit the take-up of photography on a more serious basis? That is a question that could get a very interesting answer as we continue into ever more uncertain times.
What Amateur Photographer recently reviewed
19th July 2007Amateur Photographer seems to have had a run of reviews recently. First off were the Olympus E-410 and E-510 that they seemed to like. Then, they moved onto the Ricoh Caplio GX100, which they seemed to like that too, though they did say that the quality wasn't up to SLR standards. But then again, it is a compact and that might be expecting a bit too much.
This week, Paint Shop Pro comes under the spotlight, as does Epson's V350 scanner. While I have yet to read these, I have been engaging in a spot of equipment acquisition anyway. My CanoScan 5000F scanner has been usurped by Epson's Perfection Photo 4490 and delighted I am with it too. The quality of the scans that I have been doing of prints has been good, and the presence of an on/off switch is a creditable one. When none of the other scanners that I have had possessed it, having to plug something in and out from the power socket is inconvenient to say the least.
In addition, I have also gone and got myself a new DSLR. Seeing Pentax's K10D going with an 18-55 mm lens for £499 at Jessop's overrode my better reasoning, putting paid to ideas of purchasing any other electronic goods for the rest of this year. It's an award-winning gadget, and Photography Monthly's Will Cheung seemed to get on fine with it. While Which Digital Camera said it was heavy, it has to stand up to use in the great outdoors.
Though the sensor may be a 10 megapixel affair, this will be an upgrade to my Canon EOS 10D; that has a sensor in need of clean right now (I plan to get it done by the professionals) and every time that I want to use an image that it has made, Photoshop's healing brush has to be pressed into service. Pentax does boast about all the seals that it has added to the K10D, a good thing if they cut down on the dust entering the camera. And if dust does get in, the sensor cleaning feature will hopefully see it off from the photos.
Image stabilisation, another value adding feature, is also there and may prove interesting. Strangely, there's some video capture as well, and I hope that it doesn't get the EU coming after me to collect retrospective camcorder duty. In any case, it's not a feature that I really need, with the Live View functions on the equivalent Olympus offerings falling into the same category. It'll be interesting to see how the K10D performs, given that it's a change from the Canon/Nikon hegemony that seems to dominate digital photography these days.
Update: I have since perused the current issue of Amateur Photographer and seen that Paint Shop Pro suffered from performance issues on computers that worked fine with Photoshop. Otherwise, it compared well with Adobe's offerings, even if the interface wasn't seen to be as slick. Epson's V350 was well received, though it was apparent that spending more got you a better scanner; that's always the way with these things.
A tale of two reviews
21st June 2007
Recently, I encountered two very different reviews of the newly launched Olympus E-410 DSLR, in Which Digital Camera and Practical Photography, respectively. The review in the former was a positive affair, though it was a first look at the camera, but the impression formed by the latter reviewer was lukewarm in nature.
The camera features a live electronic viewer on its back, a carry-over from digital compacts and a feature that I may never use. While that might be the unique selling point for the camera, good image quality and the fact that it possesses a cleaning mechanism for its sensor are of much more interest to me.
Ironically, the Practical Photography review spent most of its time talking about the very feature of the camera that interests me the least, with only a scant mention of quality; to be frank, I didn't find it a very useful appraisal even if the electronic viewfinder may not be all that it's cracked up to be, and it's picture quality and camera handling that ultimately matter to the photography enthusiast.
In contrast, Which Digital Camera seemed to give a more rounded view and proved to be of more interest, and I'd be interested to see what the likes of Photography Monthly and Amateur Photographer might have to say. Incidentally, I also shall be awaiting the Which Digital Camera appraisal of Ricoh's Caplio GX100 in their next issue.