Reader Simon Tanner is—like most of us—the forgetful individual who neglects to reset his camera’s clock when he moves from one global spot to another. He writes:
You have everything nicely set up at home, both your and your wife’s digital photos go straight into iPhoto and all is hunky dory. Then you go on holiday. Abroad. Somewhere exotic. Somewhere in a different time zone….. But, oh no, you forgot to reset the clock on your camera!Back home it all gets loaded into iPhoto. What a mess! Breakfast at midnight. The afternoon’s events from your camera appear before the morning shots from your wife….. etc. How can I select a block of photos and add or subtract the appropriate number of hours to get everyone’s photos back into the same time zone??!
You take your troubles to Joe. Joe Maller, that is. This regular Joe offers four useful AppleScripts in his Joe’s iPhoto AppleScripts bundle ($6 donation requested). These scripts include:
iPhoto Date Reset This script reset the date of selected photos and movies to their original creation dates.
iPhoto Date Shifter Select images, invoke the script, and you’ll be offered the opportunity to shift the images’ creation date forward or back.
iPhoto Time Shifter This is the script that solves Simon’s problem. Like iPhoto Date Shifter, it allows you to shift images’ dates forward or back in hour, minute, and second increments.
Reveal in Finder This script reveals the original file of an image in the iPhoto Library. If the image has been edited you’re offered the choice to reveal the original or the edited version.
As the Read Me reveals, you use these scripts by activating the Script Menu (done with the AppleScript Utility within the AppleScript folder inside the Applications folder) and then copying the Joe’s iPhoto AppleScripts folder to this location: youruserfolder /Library/Scripts.
If no Scripts folder exists in this location, create one.
Once the scripts are installed, launch iPhoto, select the images whose time you want to shift, and choose Joe’s iPhoto AppleScripts -> iPhoto Time Shifter from the Script menu.