Hewie's Views & Reviews 
By Hewie Poplock
Central Florida Computer Society
Remove Time Stamps from Photos, Rename & Change File Date
 
I am the webmaster for several websites. I have photos submitted to me regularly to be posted. Sometimes the photographer submits the pictures with a date stamp, which is great for identifying your personal photos, but it does not belong on those appearing on the web.
 
In most cases, it only appears on the photo because the camera owner did not realize that it was set that way, or they did not know how or even that they could turn that "feature" off.
 
If you don't have the proper date set in the camera, the date stamp will be wrong, as were several that I recently received. They showed a date that was over 3 years prior to the event, so I needed to remove them from the photos. Have you tried this? It is not easy, unless you continue reading.
 
My first thought is to crop the photos to eliminate the date. Most of the photos would lose some important pieces if I did that. I have several photo editing programs that I could edit the date stamp out. It is very time consuming and while it can be done, it was going to take more time than I wanted to devote to the project.
 
My next step was to Google the problem. I tried several combinations of terms including time stamp. There were lots of results, but most had little to do with removing the date. Many of them told me how to place it, but not remove it.
 
The most informational results were from forums where users were asking for the same solution. The most frequent response was "change the setting in the camera." DUH! Of course. What about the pictures that were already taken? I did find some good tutorials using Photoshop and other editing programs. I was still looking for a tool or hint to make it easy. Surely, I wasn't the only one with the problem.
 
I figured if there were simple steps to get rid of the red eye, certainly there is a way to get rid of a date stamp. In one of the forums, someone suggested Photo Stamp Remover by http://softorbits.com. This program appeared to be what I was looking for, and then some. According to their website, "Photo Stamp Remover is a photo correction utility that can remove scratches, dust, stains, wrinkles, tears, date stamps and other unwanted artifacts that appear on photographs. With Photo Stamp Remover, you can restore photos with the minimum of fuss."
 
I downloaded, installed, and ran the program, using the pictures that I received. In almost every case, the date stamp was removed and did a reasonable to a great job. The trial version does not do batches, but the paid version does and it works well, with 2 settings, quick, or thorough. The latter did a better job.
 
The program is a bit pricey at $40, but well worth it. A normal procedure for me is to search for coupons before making a purchase. I did so for this program and found a coupon at http://www.tjoos.com/ which is a coupon posting site. It was a 20% off code, which saved me $8.
    
While removing the date stamp, I also wanted to change the file names and not use the ones that the camera uses. For that I use a tool that I wrote about in a previous column, Lupas Rename http://rename.lupasfreeware.org/ which is free. It is an old program going back to 2005, but it still installs and works on my Windows 7 computer. You can rename batches, changing, adding to, or numbering sequentially. You can change the case of the file filename and extension. I prefer to have my photos all in lower case.
 
However, Lupas Rename does not change the file date. I had all of these pictures with the wrong date stamp, but also the file date was wrong. While there are ways to change file dates, there must be a tool to do this in a batch. Back to Google. I found Attribute Changer from http://petges.lu [4] which is a free tool. It is a power user tool to change file and folder attributes, date, time, NTFS compression, and even changes the Exif information. It runs in the Windows Shell, which allows you to right click in Windows Explorer and choose "Change Attributes." Its dialog box opens and you make your changes.
 
With these tools, I can make changes to several photos at once. I can change the file names using a title and numbering them sequentially, remove the time stamp, and then change the file date attribute. Now that's what computers were designed to do. Make tasks simpler.