Today’s Question: Regarding the checkbox for “Write date or time changes into proprietary raw files” in Catalog Settings in Lightroom Classic, why would I want to enable this? Wouldn’t that overwrite the capture time of the raw file?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The capture time for proprietary raw images will only be updated if you have the checkbox turned on in Catalog Settings and you actually change the capture time, such as to correct for not having changed the time zone on your camera when traveling.
More Detail: The capture time for photos will never be changed in Lightroom Classic unless you use the Metadata > Edit Capture Time command in Lightroom Classic. By default, changing the capture time will only update the information in the Lightroom Classic catalog, without updating the source images on your hard drive. This can cause a mismatch between the capture time in the file versus the capture time in the catalog.
If you do update the capture time for your photos in Lightroom Classic, the change will only be saved to the source image file if you have the “Automatically write changes into sidecar files (XMP/ACR)” checkbox turned on, which can be found on the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings dialog.
Furthermore, even if you have the “Automatically write changes into sidecar files (XMP/ACR)” checkbox turned on, changes will not be applied to proprietary raw captures unless you also turn on the “Write date or time changes into proprietary raw files” checkbox as well.
The reason you need to turn on an additional checkbox to apply date/time changes to proprietary raw captures is that there is a small risk that doing so could corrupt the raw capture. This is not something that I consider to be very likely, but it is a risk, and so there’s an extra precaution involved. I’m perfectly comfortable having this checkbox turned on, both because I trust that Adobe tests this feature on all supported raw capture formats and because I prefer the source file to reflect any corrections to date and time that I might have applied in Lightroom Classic.
