I’m one of those who steadily forget to adjust the time of my camera and this leads me all time into a heavy workload. At least I own next to my DSLR a Point-n-Shot camera and after taking pictures commonly the photos do not show up in the order they were taken. Beyond that when I shot together with my wife, we have photos out of 4 or 5 cameras and the chaos is programmed.

Not only that the photos do not show up in the right time order, geo tagging against a time stamp from a GPS log file is nearly impossible and lead into positioning errors. This alone is a very good reason to adjust the time in your camera.

A very simple and common way to adjust your camera time would probably to connect your camera to you PC or laptop, start the utilities that came along with your camera and sync the time to your computers clock. Of course you should have adjusted the PC time against an atomic world clock in the internet. This can be done with any kind of operation system you use, with internal or external tools, simply do a google search against “time server ntp synchronization” and your operation system.

Nikon D700 and D3 users (maybe other Nikon cameras have this feature as well) can adjust the time automatically with a GPS signal. But what if you don’t have such a Nikon or have forgotten to sync your camera at home?

Photo: Compulab

If you have a smart phone like the iPhone , well then there is an app for that, at least the app show the atomic world clock time and you can take a photo with your device showing the exact time. You also can take a picture from your (radio controlled) watch or the time in your external GPS device. At least here in Germany I would not count on a train station clock, the Deutsche Bundesbahn says that about 30% of their trains are not on time, so then I would say that at least 70% of the train station clocks must be showing a wrong time (just for the 70% of the other trains they operate).

After your shooting and import of your photos to your computer simply locate the photo where you have photographed the time and compare it to the photo’s meta data (EXIF) to get the time difference. With a batch convert that can be done in Aperture, iPhoto, ACDSee or Lightroom (and of course many other tools) you can adjust the time of all the photos taken with the same camera to a corrected time stamp.

Now all of your pictures should show up in the right time line and are ready to be geo tagged against your GPS log file.

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