Member Avatar for yosi501r

Hi everyone,

I'm desperately looking for 2 programs that do the following things:
Program 1: It's a video player that has the option to display the creation date of the video which is being played, but on the video itself!
Program 2: It's a photo viewer that can display the creation date of the photo but on the photo (on one of the corners)

Note for both:
- If the feature is customizable it is better- like can determain the color and size, position, etc.
- I'm not looking for a program that generates a new photo/ video which date converted inside as a part of the media.
- The creation date (when the photo or video was captured) is in the METADATA of the media.

Any help will be really appreciated!

  • 3 Contributors
  • 3 Replies
  • 337 Views
  • 1 Week Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by dwjohnson.7738

Dani AI

Generated

Short summary and practical options (builds on and ): Windows Explorer shows file timestamps, not the camera/video capture time; photos normally carry a reliable EXIF "DateTimeOriginal" and some image viewers can overlay that on-screen, while video container tags (e.g. MP4/MOV "creation_time") exist but are not always present or reliable. Use a viewer that reads metadata and draws it to the display (no permanent re‑encoding). See ExifTool for how photo metadata works.
(Reference: ExifTool docs: https://exiftool.org/exiftool_pod.html)

Photo viewers that meet your requirements (overlay on the image, configurable):

Video: practical approach that avoids re‑writing files

  • Use mpv (Windows builds available) plus a tiny Lua script to read container metadata and draw it as OSD/subtitle text. mpv exposes stream/container metadata via the metadata property and supports Lua scripting for custom on‑screen displays. Put scripts in %APPDATA%\mpv\scripts\ on Windows. Example (very small) script to show common creation tags:
-- show_creation_time.lua
mp.register_event("file-loaded", function()
  local keys = {"creation_time","com.apple.quicktime.creationdate","CreationDate"}
  for _,k in ipairs(keys) do
    local v = mp.get_property_native("metadata/by-key/" .. k)
    if v and v ~= "" then
      mp.osd_message("Captured: "..tostring(v), 8)
      break
    end
  end
end)

(See mpv scripting/metadata: https://mpv.io/manual/stable/ and mpv scripts location notes: https://github.com/9beach/mpv-config)

Alternatives / notes

  • VLC can draw text with its marquee/time subfilters (position/size/color), but inserting the container's capture tag into the marquee often requires extra scripting or the RC/libVLC API.
  • Before relying on any overlay, confirm the exact tag and value in your file with ffprobe or exiftool (e.g. ffprobe -v quiet -show_format -show_streams file.mp4 or exiftool file.jpg) so the viewer/script can pick the correct metadata key.
    (ffprobe/ffmpeg docs: https://ffmpeg.org/ffprobe-all.html)

Caveat: container tags vary by camera/app (and sometimes store upload time, not shot time). If a capture date is missing or wrong, the only reliable solution is to read the camera EXIF (photos) or an external source (log/GPS/timecode) and correct/standardize the metadata first with tools like ExifTool.

Recommended Answers

All 3 Replies

Member Avatar for DenisOxon

Is the date in windows explorer not what you are looking for ?

Member Avatar for yosi501r

No, this date information is not the time the picture/ video was actually taken.

Member Avatar for dwjohnson.7738

For Pictures you can use the EXIF data that is stored by the camera when the picture is taken. The user can configure their camera to embed the time/date that a picture is taken into the picture.. As far as video is concerned there is no meta-data that can be consistently used.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.