Today’s Question: I’m coming back from overseas travel where I forgot to change my camera’s time, while the time on my iPhone automatically changed. Now my photos are all mixed up. Is there a way, in Lightroom, to automatically set -5 hours to a batch of photos took with my camera?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can use the Edit Capture Time command in Lightroom Classic to update the capture time by a set number of hours very easily for a batch of photos.
More Detail: The first step is to select only the photos you need to update the capture time for. In this case, for example, only photos from the camera (not from the smartphone) need to be updated. You can use the Library Filter bar in the Library module to filter by camera model and then select all of those photos.
With all the photos that require a time correction selected, make sure you are in the grid view (thumbnails) display, not the loupe view. This will enable you to update all the selected photos at once very easily, not just the single photo shown in the loupe view, for example.
Next, go to the menu and choose Metadata > Edit Capture Time. In the Edit Capture Time dialog set the Type of Adjustment option to “Shift by a set number of hours (time zone adjust)”. In the New Time section, you can then select the number of hours you need to adjust by, which in this example is negative five (-5) hours).
Click the Change All button and the capture time for all the selected photos will be updated. Note that while you can’t use the “Undo” command to undo the time zone adjustment, you could always apply a corrective second adjustment if an error was made. For example, if you later realized that you needed to adjust the capture time by negative four hours rather than negative five hours, you could apply another correction of positive one (+1) hour to correct the photos.
Note that this topic was covered in greater detail in the November 2021 issue of Pixology magazine, which you can learn more about here: