FASTSTONE IMAGE VIEWER PART 2
QUICKLY CHANGE TIME STAMPS AND FILE NAMES OF YOUR PHOTOS
These days there are an awful lot of programs and apps you can use to edit photos. I myself have been using the program FastStone Image Viewer for years in addition to professional software. The program is free, easy to use and has a lot of useful and smart features.
I won’t explain all the features, but below are some handy tips and functionalities you can use for organizing, selecting and editing your (travel) photos.
Read below about adjusting the time stamp of photos and super fast renaming the file names of your photos.
In Part 1, you’ll read about editing photos with FastStone Image Viewer and selecting photos super easily and quickly.
FASTSTONE IMAGE VIEWER
DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL
Download the free software FastStone Image Viewer from the FastStone Image Viewer website here.
Installing the program is fairly easy. All you have to do is click ‘next’ each time, after which your installation is automatic.
A more detailed guide on how to install the program can be foundhere.
Once you have the software installed you will probably see very small samples of your photos. You can change it to a larger size:
Go to Settings > click on Settings > Go to ‘Thumbnail Browser’ > Adjust ‘Thumbnail Size’ to ‘260×195’.
Check out some super useful features below that I will explain step by step.
FASTSTONE IMAGE VIEWER
CHANGE DATE/TIME STAMP OF YOUR PHOTOS TO THE CORRECT TIME
While traveling, you obviously take your camera with you to take great pictures. Yet we also frequently reach for our phone to take a quick picture, or are traveling with others who also brought a camera.
Upon returning home, you transfer all the photos taken to your computer only to find that all the photos are mixed up. Both sorting by name and date does not make the photos appear in chronological order. You’ve been traveling to a country in a different time zone and you probably didn’t think to set your photo camera to the correct time before you went on vacation. Thus, selecting the photos does become a difficult job, since you do not have the photos of the same subject all together.
FastStone Image Viewer has a handy functionality where you can adjust the time the photo was taken. This is data that is hidden in your photo and has no effect on the quality or appearance of your photo.
Below you will find out on how to change this easily in a few steps.
STEP 1
Open FastStone Image Viewer and navigate to the folder containing the photos whose time you want to adjust.
STEP 2
Select one or more photos at a time, all with the same time difference.
For example: Have all photos taken with camera A: 4 hours time difference. Then select all photos taken with Camera A.
STEP 3
Next, go to the Tools menu and then choose ‘Change recording info selected files’.
STEP 4
Under ‘Edit’, select ‘EXIF Date (Date Time)’.
STEP 5
For example, if you had 4 hours time difference enter 4 hours here (or -4 hours, depending on whether it was 4 hours earlier or 4 hours later at your destination). You can also adjust the number of minutes.
STEP 6
Then click ‘Apply to:’, and the program will adjust the time change to all selected photos.
If you have any other cameras whose time was incorrect, select all the photos you took with the next camera and go through all the steps again to adjust the time.
STEP 7
Now find the photos in the Windows Explorer folder (not in FastStone Image Viewer).
1. Go to ‘View’.
2. Then click ‘Sort by’.
3. click ‘Taken on’.
If you have adjusted all photos to the correct time, all photos should now be in the correct order. This makes sorting and selecting your photos a lot easier because you have all the photos of the same subject together!
FASTSTONE IMAGE VIEWER
RENAME ALL PHOTOS
To make sure that it is clear in which order the photos should go in the photo book, you can give the files consecutive names.
You can do this in 2 ways:
1. CHANGING FILE NAMES IN WINDOWS FILES EXPLORER
Go to Windows Files Explorer (the folder which contains your photos), and make sure the photos are sorted by ‘taken by” (ascending), as described above in the previous section. Make sure your photos are in the correct order before continuing with the next steps.
1. Then select all photos by clicking the [CTRL] + [A] keys.
2. Then right-click on the very first photo
3. Click ‘Change name’
4. Enter for example the name of your destination here, or ‘Day 1’, or something of your own choosing.
5. Then press [Enter] and windows file explorer adjusts all the names.
2. CHANGING FILE NAMES IN FASTSTONE IMAGE VIEWER
In FastStone Image Viewer, go to the folder that contains your photos. Make sure your photos are in the correct order before continuing with the steps below (if need be you can also drag the images into a different order).
1. Then select all photos by clicking the [CTRL] + [A] keys.
2. Then click on ‘Tools’ in the menu.
3. Click ‘Re-name selected images’.
Then click ‘Start’
Or can you add the date to your file name. In that case, choose ‘Destination_$Y$M$D_###’
View a list of codes for renaming your files below.
# – Number of digits
* – Original filename
$Y – Year
$M – Month
$D – Day
$H – Hour
$N – Minute
$S – Second
Do you also always forget to adjust your camera’s time? And did you already know the trick to adjust this time?
