Capture time on GIF's

Ferguson

So I was pleasantly surprised to see Smugmug supported GIFs. Been doing a few animated ones just for fun, and (other than the Android app) they appear and look OK.

But...

I tend to auto-sort galleries by capture date/time. GIF's do not appear to support embedded tags, at least I can't make Photoshop do so. I thought perhaps I could edit it on Smugmug since Smugmug doesn't keep metadata changes inside the image (as best I can tell). but I can't see a place to edit capture time.

This means the GIF always appears at the beginning (or end as appropriate) of the gallery.

Is there a way, either prior to uploading or once on Smugmug to tag a GIF with a capture date so the gallery will sort in that order?

PS. Yes, I realize I could fall back to manual sorts, but these are sports contests and maintaining the order is relevant, and I'm sure if I switched to manual I would screw it up by forgetting when I make changes.

leftquark

Manual sorts can be blah, especially when capture time works so well.

Looks like someone posed this question before, and the answer came down to "blah, GIF's are mean "
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=247761

Ferguson

You know, frankly I forgot about that, and your search here won't allow one to search on "GIF" as it has too few letters.

But one could hope we are 18 months smarter and someone would have a good solution now.

Is there any plans in the pipeline to allow one to edit capture dates on Smugmug as one can edit other things like captions?

Richard

I just happened to be playing around with animated GIFs the other day:



They're a little silly (like, get a video camera, dude!) but fun.

I don't know what the options look like in the current CC version of PS, but in CS5, if you set the Metadata option to all, it will save the capture date/time, assuming you didn't lose it somewhere before you got to the Save For Web option:



I haven't tested whether the SM gallery sort option works, but since it does show up correctly in the SM Info panel, I would assume that it does.

This won't solve the problem with GIFs that have already been processed and uploaded. You could delete the old ones and upload reprocessed ones (don't use SM Replace, as I believe it doesn't replace the metadata). If there are a lot of them, it may not be worth the effort. But it should work for you going forward.

Ferguson

Richard wrote: »

I don't know what the options look like in the current CC version of PS, but in CS5, if you set the Metadata option to all, it will save the capture date/time, assuming you didn't lose it somewhere before you got to the Save For Web option:

I tried that once without any luck, will experiment further.

Ferguson

I tried "all" but the resulting gif does not have a DateTimeOriginal under File Info if you open it again in Photoshop. I think that's why Smugmug is not seeing it.

Does it work for you? Do you have one that's uploaded and has a capture time? Any chance you could show a link? The example you posted doesn't appear to have one.

Richard

https://rsinmadrid.smugmug.com/Other/Nljuu7/n-vvMMV/i-Q9WZhj6

If you open the info box, it shows the date taken. It looks like Dgrin does something that strips out the metadata on GIFs, but SM sees it. Dunno.

Edit: thinking about it, SM serves the image, not Dgrin, so there's something I don't understand going on . Do you see the date on the link I posted?

Ferguson

Richard wrote: »

https://rsinmadrid.smugmug.com/Other/Nljuu7/n-vvMMV/i-Q9WZhj6

If you open the info box, it shows the date taken. It looks like Dgrin does something that strips out the metadata on GIFs, but SM sees it. Dunno.

Edit: thinking about it, SM serves the image, not Dgrin, so there's something I don't understand going on . Do you see the date on the link I posted?

I do. But I can't get that shown on mine, at least so far. I'll go back and do it from the beginning again.

I'm wondering though if "Date Taken" is the same as "DateTimeOriginal" that is used for sorting. Do you find that SM will sort on this field for you?

But more to the point, I need to figure out how to get that field to appear when I upload.

And interestingly enough, if I use an EXIF viewer on the web image on your gallery it is not there, though Smugmug shows it on the info popup.

leftquark

When you added the metadata, did you replace the photo on SM? Or do a delete / re-upload? As of now we don't update metadata when an image is replaced... Though i'd love to change that.

Ferguson

leftquark wrote: »

When you added the metadata, did you replace the photo on SM? Or do a delete / re-upload? As of now we don't update metadata when an image is replaced... Though i'd love to change that.

Well... maybe sort of. This is with the Lightroom Plugin. IT has a different issue (maybe also). With it, if you change metadata, it uploads ONLY the metadata, and not the image, so if someone download's the image itself, it lacks the metadata. It appears on SM but not inside the downloaded image.

So I've been doing a "Mark for republish" when I'm all done, to force another upload of the image.

I THINK the combination of these two (publishing the change with LR Plugin, which does metadata only, then doing a republish to upload the image) gets everything in sync?

But I'm not sure. Is the replace you are speaking of the same as the replace LR plugin does? Does the plugin "fix" that by pushing the metadata (also or only)?

There's just too many subtle ways this all can go wrong.

Richard

Ferguson wrote: »

I do. But I can't get that shown on mine, at least so far. I'll go back and do it from the beginning again.

I'm wondering though if "Date Taken" is the same as "DateTimeOriginal" that is used for sorting. Do you find that SM will sort on this field for you?

But more to the point, I need to figure out how to get that field to appear when I upload.

And interestingly enough, if I use an EXIF viewer on the web image on your gallery it is not there, though Smugmug shows it on the info popup.

Yes, I had noticed that the date did not appear in SM using FxIF viewer, despite showing in the SM info panel. Perhaps FxIF doesn't know what to do with GIFs. It could also be that SM strips the date out of the GIF once it has captured it for the info box. Dunno.

As for sorting, I tried an experiment that had unsettling results. I created a new SM-style gallery and collected the animated GIF into it along with two older JPGs. In the Organizer, sorting by date taken appears to work as expected, both for ascending and descending orders. But after clicking done, the order is correct in the gallery for the two older pics, but the GIF is not where it should be. I would think this is a bug. I'm guessing it's seeing the date as zero (ie, not seeing it at all), as it's positioned first with an ascending sort and last with descending. Since the GIF is the newest of the three, it should have been the reverse. In any event, the Organizer should not show a different order than the gallery itself.

Sooo...bottom line: even if you figure out how to get the date to appear in the info box, it's not going to automatically sort correctly in the gallery unless SM fixes the bug. You might want to consider a workaround using a file naming convention that embeds a date and setting the gallery to sort by filename.

Ferguson

Richard wrote: »

You might want to consider a workaround using a file naming convention that embeds a date and setting the gallery to sort by filename.

Yeah, and that reminds me there's another Smugmug issue I need to check into again, as it comes up rarely but it is a pain. I'll sometimes have a burst, say a basketball dunk shot, and post consecutive frames that are in the same second of clock time. Smugmug apparently does not implement the tag for the subsecond times, at least it doesn't seem to sort by it. So what happens is you see the shots out of order.

I hate screwing with one field to fix another (like times in filenames) but that may be the alternative. When I get some time I'm going to experiment again (as well as with the upload/replace/update aspects) and make sure I know how each really behaves. There's just too many quirks to all this (like replace being different from delete + add, or metadata updating half way.

Ferguson

If you are curious see here for some info about how date fields are updated.

Ferguson

OK, I think I have this now, and I think it almost works, but there's yet another bug.

First, Richard, you might retry what you did before, as I am not convinced it works after recent updates to Smugmug dealing with which dates they use.

This does seem to work. Open the original TIF file (or whatever you used as input) in Photoshop, and go to the File, Information screen, and under Origin set the Date Created (as shown).

Then Export (Legacy save for web) using GIF, set metadata to All, and this field will propagate to the XMP-Photoshop "Date Created" field, which SM will interpret as Date Taken.

This does not set (nor can I find a way to set) the EXIF Date-Time-Original field, which is the Capture Date normally thought of, in the GIF itself (I do not think it can hold them).

The Capture Date shown in Lightroom in the TIF is not propagated to this field, for reasons a bit unclear.

I could not find a way to set this successfully directly in the GIF with Bridge or Photoshop. Bridge says "error writing" and Photoshop save-as dialog (not the export/legacy) does not save any XMP or other metadata that I can find. Nor did the (pre-recent-change) photoshop regular export (there is a new version out I have not tried that added features to export, so not sure there).

Anyway.. Build layered TIF, change Date Created under Origin, Export/Legacy, GIF, Metadata to all, upload - works.

So then I get a Date Taken -- which is then ignored when sorting by Date Taken even though, well, it is the Date Taken now.

I'll post that in the bugs area.

Richard

Ferguson wrote: »

First, Richard, you might retry what you did before, as I am not convinced it works after recent updates to Smugmug dealing with which dates they use.

Yes, you're correct. The link I posted above used to show the correct date taken in the SM info box, but now it's gone. Sadly, the discrepancy between the gallery and the Organizer still remains, and the gallery does not sort correctly. If I get a chance, I'll try again and see if I can use some of the stuff discussed in the other date thread.

leftquark

We just pushed an update to the way that Date Taken is sorted. We'll now use all the metadata fields, not just the EXIF information. This makes it so that GIF's, PNG's, and videos can sort within as well. Additionally, we're not sorting by subsecond, so if 2 images are taken at exactly the same time, we sort by filename.

Let me know if it works for you or if there's still an issue.
-Aaron

Richard

leftquark wrote: »

Let me know if it works for you or if there's still an issue.
-Aaron

Glad to hear there's been some progress. Just to clarify, do the new changes apply to GIFs that have already been uploaded (meaning my earlier test should work now) or only on uploads from here on out?

leftquark

It should work on all galleries, even old ones, though you'll new to change the sorting method and then change it
Back forth sorting to update.

Richard

It doesn't seem to be working correctly on the old test gallery I created back in December. Depending on the sort direction, the GIF should be either first or last, but it's showing in the middle. I did try multiple changes to the sort setting. You might want to ask one of the engineers to have a look: https://rsinmadrid.smugmug.com/Other/MuckingAbout/n-JRStr8/ It's not a public gallery, so they can play around there without causing any harm.

leftquark

Hmm... bummer. Passing it along for Engineering to take a peak at.

Richard

leftquark wrote: »

Hmm... bummer. Passing it along for Engineering to take a peak at.

I noticed this post today in another thread about date sorting problems. Might be related, as the test gallery only contains collected pics.