How To: Fix your camera sync in Lightroom

It’s one of those “Doh!” moments for photographers.  You’ve uploaded your cards, and your second shooter’s cards.  You’ve arrange everything by date in your Lightroom catalog.  You’re sitting down to cull or edit the photos when you notice that somehow everything is just a little…off.  You’ve forgotten to sync the time on your cameras.  DOH!

Fortunately, Lighroom has made an easy fix for this.  Another photographer mentioned to me about a month back that she was fixing this issue manually, and I think she was a little heartbroken to hear it could be done with just the click of a button.  In case that sounds all too familiar, here’s how to fix it next time in about 30 seconds.

Open Lightroom and go to the Library view.  In the righthand menu, scroll down through the meta data until you reach the capture time.  Click on the little icon to the right of the time setting.  Here you can see what your camera was set on for the selected image, and input what the correct time was.  I suggest looking at the difference between your correctly shot images and the ones appearing at the incorrect time, select all the images in the incorrect time category and adjust by the hours or minutes necessary to have everything line up correctly.  It’s that easy.  Quit tearing your hair out about syncing your cameras.  :)