Changing the date of thousands of images
Hi everyone. I'm at a lost right now. I just uploaded my entire photo archive to Immich including pictures almost a decade old now. A lot of them are not in the correct date/year in the Immich app. I would really appreciate it if someone could recommend a way of bulk changing the dates of these images. It's driving me crazy seeing my Immich gallery this unorganised now.
8 Replies
You can:
- Delete, edit, and re-upload
- Edit without re-uploading and save changes to xmp (preserves file hash because original isn't updated). Then run the sidecar job to discover and sync the new files
- Edit without re-uploading and save changes back to the original (file hash is out of sync with the database). Then run extract metadata for all images
To bulk edit you can use digikam or you can use exiftool or probably several other exif editors.
Depending on the size of the library you might want to correct the files and then re-upload all of them.
Thanks for the quick reply. I was also thinking of using the sidecar files, just not sure what software would be good at bulk editing
or if there is a software that could phone the data in the file name to set the metadata data?
I haven't done much myself, I know there are lots of scripts out there to correct metadata though
Digikam can update the date and time based on the filename. I have used that quite often
thanks for the help everyone, ill give digikam a shot
Hi @jrasm91, I'm experimenting with DigiKam and used Post-Processing>Adjust Time Date tool to change the date to the date in the filename. I calculated the SHA1 hash of the image before and after and saw no change. Is this supposed to happen?
I was under the impression from your first message that modifying the image time would change the hash, which would cause the database to be out of sync
does immich calculate hash in a different way than merely running the sha1sum command (which appears to not care about metadata)?
Nope, that's exactly how we do it.
so would changing the time date metadata on the image directly (no sidecar file) without re-uploading cause the database to be out of sync?
I would expect it to, yeah