• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

IPTC Date Created

Status
Not open for further replies.

Andrew1

Member
Joined
Dec 11, 2015
Messages
30
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
According to the IPTC Spec:
IPTC Date Created
Represented in the form CCYYMMDD to designate the date the intellectual content of the objectdata was created rather than the date of the creation of the physical representation. Follows ISO 8601 standard. Where the month or day cannot be determined, the information will be represented by “00”.

But... If I enter 19840000 (for example) into a .TIF file of a scanned negative for which only the year of exposure is known, then Lightroom appears to ignore it and leaves the IPTC Date Created field blank. Worse still, a subsequent export of that image doesn't include an IPTC Date Created at all (not even a reproduction of the original value).

Does anyone happen to know if this is by reason of:
(a) My misundertanding of the IPTC Spec?
(b) Program design?
(c) Software bug?
(d) Operator error - I've overlooked a setting somewhere?
(e) Insanity (it's driving me nuts!)

How does anyone else cope with recording partial dates for scans of ancient material?

I've also tried stuffing exif:datetimeoriginal fields into the TIF, but here also LR ignores those with 00 in month or day and discards the original value on export. (Admittedly the EXIF spec talks about using 'blanks' to represent unknown data but I haven't figured out how to make exiftool accept 'blanks' yet).

Regards, Andrew.

Operating System: Windows 7
Exact Lightroom Version (Help menu > System Info): 6.13 [ 1141928 ]
 
Maybe you need to put in Month 01 and Day 01 ... as it is probably failing a basic validation.

I previously used templates in PhotoMechanic to pre-populate IPTC data pre-import to Lr, but cannot remember dealing specifically with dates.
 
I don't think months = "00" and day = "00" would be according to any ISO standard. You should use 19840101 or you may estimate the months of shot.
 
I don't think months = "00" and day = "00" would be according to any ISO standard. You should use 19840101 or you may estimate the months of shot.
If you read the first message, then apparently it is the standard if the month or day is unknown. However, Lightroom is a computer application and uses a date format for this field. So the problem is that zeroes don't fit the field format, and it seems that Adobe did not anticipate this (or didn't think it was worth the effort to accommodate that).
 
Did you try just "1984", i.e. skip months and day values entirely?
At least according ISO-8601 "1984" is a valid date (literally a year) whereas 19840000 is not valid.
 
Thank you all for your thoughts.

I suspect that Johan has hit the nail on the head - Adobe either didn't think anyone would ever use Lightroom for images that didn't arrive straight from a DSLR (datestamped to the nearest second - or better) or else they just didn't read the standards ...

Whilst it is possible to enter "1984" or "1984-00-00" INTO the Lightroom IPTC Metadata panel, it doesn't come OUT again afterwards. The value will not be present in the IPTC sections of the exported file (though it will be present in XMP-photoshop but that doesn't solve my problem).

I'm simply going to have to use a range of improbable future dates, such as 2984:12:31 in my source files, and run an ExifTool script on the subsequent exports to reinstate the true values.
 
Did you report the bug to Adobe?

Tim

Sent from my LG-TP260 using Tapatalk
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top