Well, it looks like Adobe has rather screwed up the Lightroom 1.4 release.
Last week (or so) I fired up Lightroom and was asked if I wanted to install the 1.4 update. The change list looked harmless enough, so I went ahead and allowed it. Everything seemed fine, but I started noticing some oddness with the EXIF Date/Time stamps being exported.
Tonight I decided to look into it a little more and realized that all the files were being exported with the proper date stamp, but a timestamp of 00:00:00. This was confirmed with jhead.
I first went looking to Adobe’s support site, in the Lightroom forums, and one of the first things I found was a link to this post detailing problems with Adobe Lightroom 1.4 and asking people to revert to 1.3.1.
From the details of the post and replies to the comments by Tom Hogarty of Adobe who writes the Lightroom Journal:
...raw files consist of two essential pieces: the block of data that was captured by your sensor and metadata to describe that image data. In this case, Lightroom would incorrectly update the metadata when you explicitly update the metadata. If you're not planning on using Lightroom you can certainly wait for the subsequent update and install it over Lightroom 1.4 if you prefer. -TH
What. The. Fuck., Adobe? You change the original RAW files?
Yes, it seems that they do:
Lightroom has written the time stamp EXIF field back to raw files since the product was launched. This is intended to provide compatibility to other products that ignore the same field written to XMP metadata. -TH
Er… wow. It’s supposedly only the metadata, but still… Wow. This is kinda not good.
I can somewhat understand why they do it, as if a user changes the metadata of the file it gets written back so that all apps which use those raw files can see the changes. But still, that’s a bit odd.
I don’t think the result for me is too bad, except when you look at the metadata of images exported with 1.4, the timestamp is zero’d out. (Example)
This kinda sucks. Hopefully Adobe won’t screw this up again.
(There are quite a few angry replies about this here and here.)