TOPIC: ELECTRIC BATTERY
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.
Battery life
2nd October 2011In recent times, I have lugged my Toshiba Equium with me while working away from home; I needed a full screen laptop of my own for attending to various things after work hours, so it needs to come with me. It's not the most portable of things with its weight and the lack of battery life. Now that I think of it, I reckon that it's more of a desktop PC replacement machine than a mobile workhorse. After all, it only lasts an hour on its own battery away from a power socket. Virgin Trains' tightness with such things on their Pendolino trains is another matter...
Unless my BlackBerry is discounted, battery life seems to be something with which I haven't had much luck because my Asus Eee PC isn't too brilliant either. Without decent power management, two hours of battery life appears to be as good as I get from it. However, three to four hours become possible with better power management software on board. That makes the netbook even more usable, though there are others out there offering longer battery life. Still, I am not tempted by these because the gadget works well enough for me that I don't need to wonder about how money I am spending on building a mobile computing collection.
While I am not keen on spending too much cash or having a collection of computers, the battery life situation with my Toshiba more than gives me pause for thought. The figures quoted for MacBooks had me looking at them, even if they aren't at all cheap. Curiosity about the world of the Mac may make them attractive to me, only for the prices to forestall that, and the concept was left on the shelf.
Recently, PC Pro ran a remarkably well-timed review of laptops offering long battery life (in issue 205). The minimum lifetime in this collection was over five hours, so the list of reviewed devices is an interesting one for me. In fact, it even may become a shortlist should I decide to spend money on buying a more portable laptop than the Toshiba that I already have. The seventeen-hour battery life for a Sony VAIO SB series sounds intriguing, even if you need to buy an accessory to gain this. That it does over seven hours without the extra battery slice makes it more than attractive anyway. The review was food for thought and should come in handy if I decide that money needs spending.