Greetings, There is a feature I have been looking for in a photo manager for a long time. I am considering to implement something like this myself (perhaps in shotwell), so I would really like to hear your opinions about it. My feature is sort of related to Issue #1940, but not quite the same.
My starting point is that I sometimes would like to combine pictures from several (at least two) cameras in the same event. Usually my cellphone camera with my DSLR. But quite often also pictures from my wife's camera, and from her cellphone. The purpose of combining all those pictures in one event, is that I can for example show to my friends all high rated photos from our trip to Sicily in sequence as they were taken, not having to first show "my album", then "her album", then "the album with pictures from my cellphone" and finally "the album with pictures from her cellphone". Perhaps we also have pictures we got on email from some of our new friends in Italy, etc, and I would usually* like to have all photos and videos from the same day/trip in the same album. (* Except in cases as mentioned in comment2 on issue #1940, but it happens very rarely that my wife and I take pictures on two different events at the same time.) So far so good. You may think that shotwell already handles this use case. But the problem is that typically, the clocks on the different cameras are not properly synchronized. They can be off by a couple of minutes (which is usually a problem), up to several hours. For example after travelling to a different timezone and updating some, but not all cameras. Or forgetting to adjust one camera to DST, or perhaps one camera has been laying around for a while and has a higher clock drift than another. Or maybe because some video files does not contain timestamps at all, or because one image source is scanned slides. So what I seek is: A GUI for batch correcting a set of photo timestamps. You might have a different idea for a solution to this problem than me, but here is my idea, explained by example: First, I import my own photos from a trip, and then I import my wife's photos. Then I notice that the image sequence is incorrect, since the clock on her camera apparently was incorrect (both of us do really hard try to remember to set the camera clock, but we keep forgetting). So I must somehow identify the set of pictures i imported from her, and then I want to have an option called something like "adjust time". This could bring up a GUI where all the photos I selected (her photos) are shown highlighted from the rest of the photos in the library, and have a slider or something to set a fixed time adjustment for the highlighted photos. When I move the slider, the highlighted photos will "shift" in time, and I can keep pulling the slider until the photos are correctly "interlaced" with the other photos in the library. Or maybe I just pull one photo to it's correct position in the library, and shotwell automatically applies the same time adjustment to all the photos in the set. In most of my cases, a constant time adjustment like this for all photos would completely solve the problem. I do this manually by jhead now, and it works well. But finding the correct time adjustment is tedious, and would have been a lot easier with a proper GUI where you can find the correct adjustment iteratively. Cases where timestamps are missing completely (for example slides) could be handled in the same "adjust time" GUI, if the GUI also has other options than just a constant time offset for all photos. The purpose of this email is to hear if there are someone else who has the same problem as me, and in that case to hear what you think about my suggested solution. As I wrote, I am considering to try to implement something like this myself, and then I think it makes sense to hear what other people think and suggest before I start. Best regards, Eivind Lyche Melvær
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