How do you tell when a picture was taken?

I’ve read about EXIF and IJTC or whatever it is but
no one seems to know which value is the most reliable
or which one is changed by what … One article by a
guy who wrote a program to append the true date by
checking several values and using the earliest, which
makes sense but is hardly the way to make you feel
in control of your data.

Windows gives me a "picture taken date" when I put the cursor over a file but it is different than the EXIF and other data and is usually earlier and it seems more
reliable but where is it comming from? If it’s not exif
or the other than there aren’t any programs to read
and write the data so it would have to be done manually, a big job for 10s of thousands of pictures which I and
many us have …

TIA for any help … : -)

I have Exifer and "The Rename" and Elements 4.

AKA gray asphalt wrote:

I’ve read about EXIF and IJTC or whatever it is but
no one seems to know which value is the most reliable
or which one is changed by what … One article by a
guy who wrote a program to append the true date by
checking several values and using the earliest, which
makes sense but is hardly the way to make you feel
in control of your data.

Windows gives me a "picture taken date" when I put the cursor over a file but it is different than the EXIF and other data and is usually earlier and it seems more
reliable but where is it comming from? If it’s not exif
or the other than there aren’t any programs to read
and write the data so it would have to be done manually, a big job for 10s of thousands of pictures which I and
many us have …

TIA for any help … : -)

I have Exifer and "The Rename" and Elements 4.

assuming your camera’s internal clock is correct, the exif date is the date the image was made.

There seem to be several EXIF things though.
Date digitized is a little confusing … can a picture
be digitized on a different date that it is taken?
Is there only one EXIF date field … mayb the
program is just presenting it in different forms.
Can the "Date Modified" be changed in the EXIF data; I mean by a program inadvertently? What
is a modified date in EXIF language? It seems to
be different than the file modifed field in Windows XP.
Thanks for your help.

AKA gray asphalt wrote:

There seem to be several EXIF things though.
Date digitized is a little confusing … can a picture
be digitized on a different date that it is taken?
Is there only one EXIF date field … mayb the
program is just presenting it in different forms.
Can the "Date Modified" be changed in the EXIF data; I mean by a program inadvertently? What
is a modified date in EXIF language? It seems to
be different than the file modifed field in Windows XP.
Thanks for your help.

Date digitized would come up when you are scanning slides or negatives. If you’re doing stuff that you shot in the 80s, then date
taken would be quite a bit before the date digitized.

If you load up a picture into PE, then save it w/o making any changes that would change the windows date modified, but not the
EXIF date modified.

"Brion K. Lienhart" wrote in message

Date digitized would come up when you are scanning slides or negatives. If you’re doing stuff that you shot in the 80s, then date
taken would be quite a bit before the date digitized.

If you load up a picture into PE, then save it w/o making any changes that would change the windows date modified, but not the
EXIF date modified.

I don’t think that scans get any EXIF info. It would be a good idea to use date digitized for the use that you mention but it would require to be written by software other than the scanning software. Good idea though. If there is scanning software that does that I’d like to know about it. : -)