Changing Timestamp in Lightroom

Having a second photographer with you on a wedding day is awesome - it allows for more than one angle of the same pose, different events that are happening during the day to be photographed at the same time, possibly details at the reception before guests arrive (and before you, as the main photographer, would be able to get there)…

But then you import all those different places at the same time into Lightroom and try to start culling - and your pictures are all over the place! Some of your ceremony pictures are mixed up with your seconds getting ready images. Your seconds pictures of the groom and groomsmen are mixed in with your newlywed portraits - it’s a mess.

There are two ways to avoid this:

Sync your cameras before you begin.

This is the best way. Honestly, if you can remember to do it, do. You can either sync them to a global computer time or each other - but it will make life easier.

But what happens when you don’t?

Well, you can spend hours dragging and dropping every picture from a wedding into the correct order…. you can cull and edit completely out of order (this would drive me insane) or you can (as the heading of this blog post suggests)

Change the timestamp of your images in Lightroom

To do this, you need to have a base time to adjust them by. You can either find a picture from each camera that you took at about the same time and adjust all the times to match (it takes a bit of extra sleuthing, especially when you shoot with more than one camera each, but it can be done), or with minimal preparation, you can make life easier on yourself and remember to take a picture of a phone with the website https://www.timeanddate.com opened up showing your local time down to the millisecond.

Here’s a full video of how to accomplish this!