Adding a Taken Date to an mp4 for use by Smart Gallery rule

dougienisbet

I really like Smart Galleries. I use tags a lot and they're making me re-think a lot of my ideas about gallery structure.

I'm trying a couple of things out and notice that I can combine a keyword with a date taken range (e.g. Dec 2023). This is great. Trying it on a video (mp4) and I notice that the video will take a keyword that I can assign on SmugMug, but not a date taken.

My question is can I tag a date taken onto an mp4 - I'm assuming I'll have to do this before upload, then use it in smart gallery rules?

In fact, why don't I just try it out. Be right back ...

dougienisbet

Hmmm ... I created two test mp4 files and used ffmpeg and exitool respectively to assign the Creation Date to each video. This is in Linux and was very hacky as I've used neither options before but it seems to be there. Uploaded to SM and it recognises them as having a 1dec22 creation date. No sign of them - oh hang on. It's worked! Oh I like that.

So the only (minor) workflow issue I can see is that I have to do it before upload as I don't think I can assign a Date Taken to an uploaded video. Is this correct? It's not a huge issue I just need to remember to do it.

Any command line exiftool/ffmpeg users who might suggest a one-liner? I've a feeling exiftool would be the better option but I had to do it in two lines, 1st taking the creation date from the first video file then assigning it to the destination filename. Using ffmpeg works too. I've no idea if one is better than the other, and I still need to explore whether I can do it at file creation time.

Background: The videos I'm playing with are concatenated short garden trailcam videos joined in shotcut. So it might be possible to do it in shotcut. Will investigate.

Test gallery: https://photos.katsura.uk/The-Garden/2022/Smart-december-test/

Dougie

Teach

Dougie,

You are correct that the date taken has to be assigned before uploading to SmugMug.

As for the "exiftool/ffmpeg" user question, I am going to leave that question for those who use it more frequently than myself to see if they have any great suggestions for you.