Working with digital images

[devotchka]

Hello, I have a question about date-stamps on pictures taken with a Sony Cybershot 5.1.

I have a large series of photos with date stamps on them that I need to remove.  I know about the methods of covering up the date and other ways of using artistry and Photoshop to mask the date.  This would take way too long for the number of photos I have.

The interesting thing is that I noticed that when I look at thumbnails of the photos, there is NO date stamp.  The thumbnail shows the whole picture without any date.  This leads me to believe that somewhere, there is data for the pixels/part of the picture covered by the date stamp, and that I may be able to access this data and have all the date stamps removed, if you follow me.

Does anyone know anything about this?

Thanks very much!

[ShutterbugGail]

Hello devotchka,

Welcome to the Q&A Board!

I assume you're talking about the date stamped right on the original image and not only when it is printed. Am I correct? There are programs to edit EXIF data and maybe the information can be removed. But digital images also contain imbedded backup data known as Marker notes, so you may have to edit that too.

Let me think about this a bit more.

btw, there must be a camera setting to disable date stamps appearing on your image files.

Related reading:

EXIF http://www.digicamhelp.com/what-is-exif/index.htm

[devotchka]

Hi, thanks for your reply.

Yes, I was reffering to pictures that are still in digital format, not prints.  The reason I want the dates removed is so that I can make prints for framing!

I know about camera settings to disable date-stamping; the pictures were taken by someone else (to whom I have since reccomended turning off the date stamp feature!).

[ShutterbugGail]

You may want to try the free program, EXIFer to see if the information can be stripped from the marker notes and, as a result, no longer appear in the image:

http://www.friedemann-schmidt.com/software/exifer/

If that doesn't work, I highly recommend you ask your question in one of the forums a dpreview, such as the this one:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1002

They are geared to handling these more technical questions than we are.