Sync times on photos taken from multiple unsynced cameras

This tutorial will explain how to sync photos from various cameras by time (hour, minutes, seconds).

Why would you want to do this? An example: You and other photographers are shooting photos at a family event. You later want to combine all the photos chronologically. You can use Picasa to drag photos into place chronologically (this can be difficult and time consuming), or you can try to sync all the photos to make sorting easier.

How can cameras be out of sync? Someone from a different time zone may have forgotten to change to the present time zone. A camera may have been set wrong, for example, 10 minutes too early. If someone forgot to set a date and time on a new camera, this tutorial will not help to sync the time, but the date can be synced.

Please Backup your photos and videos before proceeding. If something goes wrong, you can recover the original photos and try again.

There are two ways to sync times:

Method 1 uses Windows File Explorer: Steps 2, 3, and 4

Method 2 uses Picasa: Steps 7-10

You need to be able to identify and select the group of photos belonging to a particular camera. Any method to do this will work.

You can skip steps 1-3 when the photos are already separated in a folder per camera or when you can easily identify them. For example when all camera names (as seen in the edit window) are different, you can search with the camera name. Or you can sort the photos by file name.

• 1. In Windows Explorer, create a new folder on your computer, then place all the photos from all cameras used for the event into the new folder. (Step 2 and 3 below can be ignored if you already have photos separated into different folders by camera.)

  2. Sort the photos by file name. Because of differences in file names of various cameras, sorting will gather the photos together from each camera.

     1. 1. In Windows Explorer, right-click an empty space, select "Sort by" then select "Name" and "Ascending."

        2. In Picasa3, right-click the folder name, select "Sort Folder By" then "Name."

  3. Move the photos from each camera into a sub-folder created for just that camera.

• • • 1. In Windows Explorer, click File > New > Folder then name the folder; select, drag and move the photos.

      2. In Picasa3, select the photos for one camera, right-click and select "Move to New Folder"; name the folder, click OK.

• 4. Batch tag all the photos in each sub-folder with a designator to tell which camera they came from, for example the photographer name. This step is an optional safeguard to be able to identify photos from a camera in case of identical camera types and renaming the photos.

• • • 1. In Windows File Explorer, select all the photos (Ctrl A), click "Show more details" then type the designator into the Tags field. Click "Save"

      2. In Picasa, select all the photos, press Ctrl T (or click the "Show/Hide Tags Panel" button)

      3. In the "Type in a tag to add" field, type the designator, then press the green + button

• 5. Find the camera that you believe has the most correct time. (This will be the "base camera")

  6. For each of the other cameras where the times do not sync with the base camera, try to find one photo that was taken about the same time as a photo from the base camera.

• • • 1. Important! In Picasa, drag that photo to the beginning of all the photos of that camera.

• 7. Sync the time of all the un-synced photos for each camera (use Picasa for the following steps):

• • • 1. Select all the photos of one camera to be synced. If in a sub-folder, select all the photos (Ctrl A).

      2. Click "Tools" then "Adjust date and time."

      3. In the "Adjust photo date" window, make sure the thumbnail displays the photo that you dragged into first position in Step 6.1.

      4. Following the field "New photo date," change the time to match the corresponding base camera photo.

      5. Make sure "Adjust all photo dates by the amount" is selected.

      6. Click OK.

      7. The other photos will be adjusted by the same amount (hours, minutes, seconds). Picasa calculates the time difference from the original date/time set by the camera and the date/time you specify. It then adds or subtracts that single difference from all the photos selected.

      8. Repeat syncing (Steps 6 to Steps 7.5) for all batches of photos from cameras - one at a time.

• 8. Combine all the photos from all the cameras, then sort chronologically.

• • • 1. In Picasa, right-click the folder name, select "Sort Folder By" then "Name."

      2. You can manually move photos, if desired.

• 9. Rename the entire group of photos using Picasa.

• • • 1. Select all (Ctrl A)

      2. Click File > Rename (or press the F2 key)

      3. Take note of how many photos are selected for rename (to be sure you haven't accidentally selected photos from other folders).

      4. Type in a file name followed by -001 [Example: 2015_12_31_new_years_eve-001]

      5. Picasa will rename all the photos in numerical sequence -001 -002 etc

      6. If you have the free "CleanFileName" button from the PicasaStarter website, you can use it to remove the dash from the file name and replace it with an underscore: https://sites.google.com/site/picasastartersite/custom-picasa-buttons/CleanFileName (Why to remove dashes is discussed here: https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/Home/Picasa-FAQ/picasa/how-to/how-to-search-in-picasa)

• 10. If you made a mistake in syncing or would like to redo the times for a particular camera, the camera name or the tag designating the particular camera can get you back to that group again, whether or not you've changed the file names.

Tip for your next photo shoot: If you are at event with a number of different people taking photos, shoot something together at the same time. You can later use that single identical photo to set the time differences between cameras. Another option is to ask everyone to set their camera time to the correct time before the shooting begins.