Shawn Truax Photography

Arbitrarily Changing Time in Adobe Lightroom

 

There are many reasons you may want to change the capture time of your photos. The number one reason is traveling to another time zone and forgetting to change the time on your camera to reflect the local time. Lightroom, thankfully, has an easy way to fix this. Just select your photos and then choose the batch time change option and then select the time zone you need to change too.

What Lightroom is not so intuitive with explaining is changing time by an arbitrary amount. For example, if the timezone you are changing to happens to be one that is +0.5 hours, for Newfoundland Standard Time. The “Edit Time Capture” window only shows timezones that are on the hour. Another reason to want to change the capture time is your camera’s time is off by a few minutes. However, in the Edit Time Capture window there doesn’t appear to be an option or instructions for fixing these situations.

The question then becomes: Is it possible to do, and how can these types of time changes be done quickly and easily? Fortunately, it is possible and easy to do in 3 simple steps.

Steps to Change Time

In this example situation the photographer has a batch of photos that need to have the capture time increased by 30 minutes to reflect traveling from Atlantic Standard Time to Newfoundland Standard Time.

Step 1: Select the first photo in the series that you want to batch time change then hold the shift key and select the last photo in the series. Your selection should look similar to the screen shot below, with the first photo as the primary selection (with the brighter selection box around it).

In this particular series the first photo was taken at 6:39:41pm and the last photo was taken at 7:16:48pm.

Step 2: Select the batch time change button to the right of the “Capture Time” field that will now have no time listed because of the batch selection. (The button with the 3 dots and lines stacked up, seen in the upper right corner of the screen shot below.)

This will bring up the Edit Capture Time window.

Step 3: Selecting the “Adjust to a specific date and time” option change the time to the correct time for the first photo. In this case we are adding 30 minutes so we change the time from 6:39:41 to 7:09:41 as seen in the example below.

Make note of the warning to the left of the “Cancel” button and then when ready click the “Change All” button and you’re done. That’s all there is too it!

If you look at the first and last photo again, as we did in the beginning of this example, you will see that the time has changed to 7:09:41pm and the last photo is now set to 7:46:48pm.

Conclusion

This is a really easy process that, unfortunately, is not explained very well by the Lightroom interface. The only one warning to be aware of is that there is no undo command, CTRL-Z will not undo this change. If you make a mistake the only way to fix it is to repeat the process above and subtract the amount added.

Update

There appear to be some cases where the “Edit Capture Time” button is not appearing as described in step 2. If you don’t see this button when you get to Step 2 the alternate method of bring up the “Edit Capture Time” window is to choose the “Metadata” menu and then choose “Edit Capture Time” from the drop down menu.