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I have 3000 photos taken this year (2017) on a camera which had the date & time set incorrectly so all these photos are stamped with a 2015 date.

I would like to change the time stamp on all of these photos. I am going to upload them to Google Photos eventually.

I know I can do this very easily on Google Photos but the problem is that there are other existing photos on the account and my 3000 photos will mix in with them so when I would want to change their date, I would have to go and hand-select one by one. And AFAIK there is no way to tell the Google Photo uploader to sync the photos into an album.

I guess an option would be to create the album on Google Photos via web and upload directly into the album but the upload will take forever and I am pretty sure I'd lose control over it (network issues, PC issues, etc).

So I thought I would do the change before uploading them. Is there any windows tool (command line will do) to - basically set the start date of the batch and the tool would move all the time stamps accordingly?

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You could try the (free) PyExifToolGUI which is a actually a frontend for the command line tool ExifTool. I don't know if the Windows installer needs you to install ExitTool (and several Python packages) separately.

The linked page has details of the manual and installation.

I have it on my system and you can select one or multiple files and set particular fields in the metadata (including the EXIF data).

To get used to it try copying some of your existing files to a temp folder and working on that copy to verify it does what you want.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ ExifTool is a reasoneable choice. It is rather powerful and might be an overkill for the task needed (and as command line tool is not exactly user friendly) but it will deliver. \$\endgroup\$
    – Jindra Lacko
    Sep 18, 2017 at 14:26
  • \$\begingroup\$ @jindraLacko The linked software is a nice front end for ExifTool - it's a GUI not the raw command line tool itself. \$\endgroup\$
    – StephenG - Help Ukraine
    Sep 18, 2017 at 15:31
  • \$\begingroup\$ Much better than :) I started with ExifTool by using lenstagger (another frontend, this one from Lightroom) and I grew to like it, but I would hardly call it easy \$\endgroup\$
    – Jindra Lacko
    Sep 18, 2017 at 15:35
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After some more googling and looking around I found jhead

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

Windows users: download the "Pre-built Windows executable" jhead.exe and place it into the folder with your photos.

This is how you change the date taken on all photos in the folder by a defined time span (as documented on the website)

(my photos were ACTUALLY started being taken on 2017:04:22 but camera was set to 2015:07:21)

jhead.exe -da2017:04:22-2015:07:21 *.jpg

The program will shift the Date Taken on all the photos by the specified time range.

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