Arranging videos by date taken

[cos80919]

Hello,

I am trying to combine videos and photos into an individual gallery. I want them all to be in order by the date they were taken but that info is not available in the video files. My question is, is there anyway to embed the date taken into the video files? Manual arranging the order of the videos is a real pain.

Thanks,
Mike

[docwalker]

Mike, Videos don't have the same exif data that we use for photos. Sorry. Manual positioning is going to the best option.

[darryl]

But but...

SmugMug stores date/time taken in its databases, right? Like, when you sort an album of images by date, it doesn't read EXIF headers for every photo then, correct? It probably parses EXIF after the image is uploaded, and it then adds the date/time metadata to the database.

The reason I mention this is that while AVI and MOV files do not contain EXIF data, the vast majority of current digital cameras that have movie mode offer a preview image for each video that *does* have EXIF information for date taken.

On Canon cameras, there are .THM (thumbnail) files (which is the same file that DSLRs create when you're shooting RAW (CRW) images, which also lack EXIF info.) These are just tiny JPEG files with the metadata for the movie.

Typically the filenames be the same as the movie file, with just the extension changed, so MVI_1234.AVI and MVI_1234.THM will be a pair.

I know that Kodak cameras also offer a "preview" image, and I imagine Nikon must as well. (I'm still digging for a reference.)

What would be *great* is if you uploaded .THM files along with your corresponding .AVI files, SmugMug would be smart enough to copy the metadata from that file so you *could* sort by date taken. This would be especially great for people that intermingle photos and video.

Phanfare's Windows client, by the way, does this very thing, and it is very very cool.

[cos80919]

Thanks for the replies! I will check out Phanfare's Windows client.

-Mike

[darryl]

Well, Phanfare's client only works with the Phanfare service. But you can get a free 1GB account to see how their client works. I'm a big fan.

[Andrew Maiman]

The reason I mention this is that while AVI and MOV files do not contain EXIF data, the vast majority of current digital cameras that have movie mode offer a preview image for each video that *does* have EXIF information for date taken.

On Canon cameras, there are .THM (thumbnail) files (which is the same file that DSLRs create when you're shooting RAW (CRW) images, which also lack EXIF info.) These are just tiny JPEG files with the metadata for the movie.

Typically the filenames be the same as the movie file, with just the extension changed, so MVI_1234.AVI and MVI_1234.THM will be a pair.

What would be *great* is if you uploaded .THM files along with your corresponding .AVI files, SmugMug would be smart enough to copy the metadata from that file so you *could* sort by date taken. This would be especially great for people that intermingle photos and video.

I agree, this would be a very useful feature. (Spent quite a while yesterday manually moving around video files, it it's a real pain when you have a bunch of them to have to manually position them). I tried sorting the file list on my computer by date before uploading the files, but since the uploader in IE uploads 3 files at a time, it doesn't leave them in the order that I dragged them into the uploader window. Firefox uploader (one at a time) would be better if it didn't crash the browser on large filesets (see this thread (http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=105177) about that)