I occasionally find myself setting the wrong date on my camera and ending up with 100s of pictures that need the dates edited on them. In the past I made these changes with programs that made me edit the dates one picture at a time. I want to set the year ahead or the hour back on 100s of pictures all at once.

JHead to the rescue! Just today I discovered that I needed to set the date back on 100 pictures that I had taken since daylight savings time. With jhead I just stuck the pictures with bad dates in a folder and ran

jhead -ta-1 *jpg

then I changed the actual timestamps on the files to match the EXIF data with

jhead -ft *.jpg

Now that my pictures had the correct hour I was hoping to see my pictures and my daughters in order in picasa. For example. The picture of Maia taking a picture of a boat should be followed by the picture of the boat.

It wasn't! Turns out her camera was 5 minutes ahead of mine. With jhead this is not an issue.

jhead -ta-0:05 HP*jpg

jhead -ft HP*jpg

This moved the time on all her HP pictures back 5 minutes.

Now the pictures are in order and I'm happy. ya. I'm just a little anal.

Here is my picture

Here is what Maia got

More jhead notes are on my wiki