Capture Date/Time - clobbered by LR 1.1

Question

Oh No!
It appears that LR 1.1 has clobbered the Capture Date/Time after writing out the metadata.
To try to be clearer, I've been using Elements 5.0 which organizes my photos (all jpg) by date. The date the photo was taken (which is also the date the file was created) are important to me. Those fields are respected by other Adobe products (Album, Elements 5.0 and Bridge CS2). Somehow LR 1.1 treats this date differently and with less importance than other Adobe and non-Adobe applications.
I am not too concerned about the date that the metadata was changed, which LR shows. I want to see the date the picture was taken.
The only way I managed to see that in LR was to customize the display using
Jeffrey's Lightroom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder (for Lightroom 1.1). (Why I had to use a 3rd party add template creator to see the Capture Date/Time I don't know - it should be right there in LR - but leave that aside for the moment) .
Anyhow, I manipulate the metadata by adding keywords and then tell LR to write that to the files. In this process the creation date/time vanished on a number of photos. The only way I could get it back was to use a backup of the original files (losing keywords and other data in the process)or to use Exifier to set the date/time, remove the collection from LR and reimport.
Something as important as the date and time the photo was taken (file creation) is a key bit of data that should be readily available and visible in the metadata display and should not be clobbered or lost when writing out metadata to the files. I see there are other complaints about this and some expressing horror that Adobe didn't fix it in LR 1.1.
My point is simple - for my purposes I cannot fully utilize LR 1.1 if the Creation Date/Time cannot be readily seen, or is in danger of being lost, I would have to use other software.
Geeze, and I was beginning to get comfortable with LR...
Maybe the good folks at Adobe have some comment and might be able to rectify this?
In the alternative, is there something I'm missing about the way Capture Date/Time is supposed to be treated by LR users?
Advice and pointers would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Christopher wrote:
"I hear ya, but if someone could just say, this is how dates are supposed to work ... that would be helpful. In particular, what fields or fields does the Metadata Browser use to sort an image into a date bin? If I knew that, I might be able to determine why so many of my images are put into the Unknown Date heading."
Here we go:
1. None DateTime tag defined in exif (or DateTime tags corrupted)
-in Metadata Browser (left panel) Date will be seen as Unknown Date.
-Thumbnail show no DateTime value,
-in Matadata (right) panel, there will be no DateTime caption visible
2. Only ModifyDate defined in exif
-in Matadata Browser value of ModifyDate will be shown,
-Thumbnail show no DateTime value,
-in Matadata panel, ModifyDate will be shown as Time
3. Only CreateDate defined in exif
-in Metadata Browser value of CreateDate will be shown,
-Thumbnail show no DateTime value,
-in Metadata panel, CreateDate will be shown as DateTimeDigitized
4. Only DateTimeOriginal defined in exif
-in Metadata Browser value of DateTimeOriginal will be shown,
-Thumbnail shows value of DateTimeOriginal,
-in Metadata panel, DateTimeOriginal will be shown as Capture Time
+in Medatada panel, DateTimeOriginal will be shown as Time
5. All three DateTime values defined in exif
-in Metadata Browser value of DateTimeOriginal will be shown,
-Thumbnail shows value of DateTimeOriginal,
-Metadata panel shows CreateDate as DateTimeDigitized,
+Metadata panel shows DateTimeOriginal as CaptureTime,
+Metadata panel shows ModifyDate as Time
That's it. Now... why are we confused in LR when speaking of DateTime?
In Metadata Browser any of exif's DateTime value can be shown. That is, looking at this panel only, we never know what Date is being used! Anyway, DateTimeOriginal has priority: if DateTimeOriginal exist, it will be used for Metadata Browser -otherwise any other existing exif DateTime tag will be used.
But if only DateTimeOriginal is missing (so both, CreateDate and ModifyDate exist), then CreateDate has priority over ModifyDate: CreateDate will be shown.
Priority in short: DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate, ModifyDate.
Thumbnails: only if DateTimeOriginal exists, thumbnail will contain DateTime value -otherwise thumbnail's DateTime will be blank.
Sorting of thumbnails per CaptureTime (hence by exif DateTimeOriginal) is another story and can be quite confusing at first sight... because DateTime priorities seems to be the same as for Metadata Browser:
If exif DateTimeOriginal exist (=CaptureTime in LR), then this value will be used for sorting. But if this value is missing, LR will try to use exif CreateDate and if this is missing too, ModifyDate will be used. OK, there's some logic... except, why I'm repeating "if this tag is missing..."?
Because when you modify/rewrite some image, then some tool may damage DateTime in exif -remember: damaged DateTime tag is the same as tag doesn't exist!
In short: if there's exif DateTime corruption involved, you can't be sure which of three DateTime tags is being used for sorting. For some images DateTimeOriginal will be used, for those that are missing that tag, CreateDate will be used instead.
Images missing exif DateTime tags (or these are corrupted), will be shown as first (sort A-Z).
Bogdan