Update: Microsoft doesn't care about photographers

I've been working with Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 1.0 for a couple of weeks now. It has consistently failed in living up to the most basic expectations one might have had from reading its name. Consequently, I suggest a name change to Microsoft No Photo Tools.

Is this another case of senseless Microsoft bashing? I don't think so. Yesterday, after editing the "date taken" of a batch of photographs (and prudently saving the photos) I wanted to exit No Photo Tools. The program told me that my files had been changed and offered me a chance to save them - again. I said 'yes.' Wouldn't you? No Photo Tools then proceeded to give each and every photo the same capture time, identical to the current time.

How could this be? Instead of checking the opened photos' capture time against the original photos' capture time, No Photo Tools appears to have checked the last change time. I had previously changed the capture date in each picture, so they all had a capture date different from their last change time. However, how No Photo Tools came upon the idea of changing the capture time to the current time is entirely beyond me.

Luckily, I had preserved the captured time in the file name. I always extract the photos from my D40 using Nikon Transfer 1.1. This excellent program can change file names from the generic 'DSC_9999.JPG' to the date and time the photo was taken.

I now faced the daunting task of manually editing the hour/minute/second taken of several hundred photographs. Of course, No Photo Tools has a feature allowing this. However, the feature is implemented so clumsily that it amounts to a time sink. For no apparent reason, the Microsoft programmer behind this mess has implemented the hour and minute as three digits each, only two of which are visible. Tabbing between the hour, minute, and second fields takes two clicks on the Tab key for each field, and then you have to select the three digits in each field, either by a double-click or Ctrl-A. Only then can you enter the correct information.

This miserable excuse for a tag editing program is barely an alpha version, let alone beta. Stay away from it. There are much better options out there in the open source community. For tag editing single photos, XnView is primitive, but entirely dependable. For geotagging, I recommend Geosetter. For renaming JPGs, I've used Amok Exif Sorter for some time. Finally, if you want to batch edit tags in hundreds of photos at a time, you won't regret getting Phil Harvey's ExifTool. Sure, learning how to use this command-line tool will take some time, but the time spent will save you many, many hours down the road. Oh, and ExifToolGUI by Bogdan Hrastnik takes the sting out of ExifTool by giving it a visual interface.