Attempt to change Capture Time mm/dd/yyyy not working

[bayhead]

I am using Lightroom Classic CC 8.2 on a Mac running Mojave 10.14.4 and can no longer change the Capture Time  correctly in the Metadata using the "Change Capture Time" function. Specifically, if you try to change the month, date, and year of Capture Time either for a single photo or for a group of photos, the month and day is accepted and changed correctly but you can only input three digits in YYYY field, not the full four digits. Moreover, if you try to enter the forth digit of the year, only that last digit is accepted and the date gets recorded incorrectly on the stored metadata.

For example,  if want to change the Capture Date to "06/15/1998", Lightroom accepts the 06/15 part of the date but will not accept the full 4-digits "1998 - only the first three digits "199". If you try to input the forth digit "8", Lightroom only accepts and stores the last (right-most) digit and the changed date gets erroneously set to 6/15/   8 – see screen shot.

  The metadata on the catalog is also screwed up - see the entries "0003" (should be "2003") and "0097" (should be "1997").

This problem has stopped my scanning project since all the photos I am scanning need to have the Capture Time reset.

Any help to this problem is appreciated.

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

The year box has long been very fussy on Mac OS -- if you pause just a fraction of a second, any further typing will overwrite what came before. So try typing as fast as you can, with no pauses.  See this old bug report: Lightroom: Unable to set capture date to 1966 (Mac) | Photoshop Family Customer Community

[johnrellis]

Also, I can replicate your behavior if I pause a fraction of a heartbeat between each digit.  Depending on how slowly I type, I can get the fourth digit to overwrite the first three.  (I'm a very fast typist so I rarely see this issue.)

[bayhead]

Thank you for your help with this. Typing fast worked and I was able to

change the date as desired. Problem solved. I think I had slowed down my

typing because I had encountered the problem and was trying to press each

key carefully. Ha! Sometimes it's better to go fast than to go slow.

I marked the answer "Correct" as requested. Thanks again.

Tom

[johnrellis]

I just filed a new bug report on this: Lightroom: Year field in Edit Capture Time doesn't allow slow typing | Photoshop Family Customer Com...

[bayhead]

Thank you - sounds good.

John. I've run into another minor issue which I will try to document more

fully in the next few days. In some cases, the feature to correct the

Capture Time on multiple photos with one correction does not work correctly

- it only changes the first photo in the selected list. You then have to go

back one-by-one and correct each of the photos independently, rather than

in mass.

Tom

[johnrellis]

In some cases, the feature to correct the Capture Time on multiple photos with one correction does not work correctly - it only changes the first photo in the selected list.

A couple of things to note:

- When Edit Capture Time is invoked on multiple photos, it shifts the times of all the photos by the same amount. In LR proper, there is no way to set a batch of photos (e.g. scans) to have the same exact capture time -- you need a third-party plugin.

- When you're in Loupe mode (viewing a single photo) and you select multiple photos from the filmstrip, by default Edit Capture Time will only change the currently selected photo. You have to turn on the Auto Sync toggle in the lower-right corner to be able to change the capture time of multiple photos in Loupe mode. But I strongly recommend never turning on Auto Sync -- it's way too easy to forget to turn it off, and there are too many sad stories of people discovering too late they've modified dozens, hundreds, or thousands of photos with no easy way to recover.