Peter Jason wrote:
On Fri, 6 Dec 2019 21:47:48 -0500, "Mayayana"
wrote:

"Peter Jason" wrote

|I have a Samsung / Android smartphone.
|
| Is there any app to automatically & permantely burn the Date/Time on
| to the photo, like in the old film days?
|

If you're taking JPGs the date is probably already there.
Open a photo in IrfanView and check the image properties
to find out if there's EXIF data. But there's no such thing
as permanent. EXIF data is just optional data added to a
JPG header. Personally I usually strip it out for privacy if
I do any editing and/or use an image online.

You could theoretically use a system to embed data in
pixels, but even then it would be lost if the image were
opened and resaved. The image is just a bitmap that's
compressed. In other words, it contains a grid of pixel
color values. That's all there is in a raster image. The
rest is expendable and depends on the image format as
well as software.

I found a camera that seems to do it...
https://postimg.cc/cvX6jTMF

(Sanyo VPC-E10EX)

You don't have to "buy" this function.

Cameras insert EXIF data automatically as
part of shooting photos.

https://i.postimg.cc/9QCMPvhW/sample-exif-data.gif

"Date Picture Taken:" === EXIF data, inside the picture (4CC code...)

"Date Modified" === File Explorer info, when pic loaded from cam
(will be some time after the previous field)

Transferring hidden metadata to the surface
of the photo (which is an "image damaging step")
is a separate process. And less critical than
first ascertaining that the photos you are
taking, have the EXIF in the first place.

And as we've noted in previous questions
on the topic, Windows Search is indexing the
EXIF on your pictures too. It's just
a matter of finding the supported list of
EXIF fields, to search against them.
Not all of the EXIF fields in a photo are
indexed (although they should be).

datetaken:10/1/2014

EXIF could be removed, as a result of editing
with various tools. For example, if I used
NETPBM, transferred jpg == ppm == jpg, then
I would expect to lose the EXIF data.

So if you need "datetaken" to be transferred
to the front surface of the picture, that has
to be done with a non-naive tool. You can't have
junk tooling in the workflow, or there could be
loss of stuff like that.

That's also the reason, that incoming materials
should be archived, and kept separate from all
of the steps that come after it.

There are other devices that don't
use EXIF. A cheap webcam isn't going to stamp
like that. VLC screenshots wouldn't have it.
GIMP screenshots wouldn't have it. But digital
cameras are usually pretty good at placing
that info in EXIF.

*******

So now is the fun part. What fun would it be
to use a dedicated stamper program, when you
can whip up some commands for your own self ? :-)

materials:

imagemagick
gawk # only because I'm not good with script

files in work folder:

magick.exe
mfc120u.dll
msvcr120.dll
msvcp120.dll
vcomp120.dll
gawk.exe

magick identify -verbose img_0034.jpg | findstr "DateTime:" | gawk "{print $2 \" \" $3}" mywords.txt

magick convert img_0034.jpg -gravity SouthEast -pointsize 100 -fill red -font Arial -annotate +300+200 @mywords.txt out.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/bNHf1K5y/timestamping.jpg

Paul