Custom Image Dates

SierraBravoFour

I am using Zenphoto to build an archive of magazine covers and would like to use the date field to set a custom date for each image corresponding to the original date of the magazine cover. This info would then be displayed below the image thumbnails on album pages, as well as on individual image pages.

The problem I am having is that the custom dates I have entered for all of the images are not "sticking". After browsing a few albums or images, at some point the system seems to sense that the custom date is not the same as the file modification date of the image, and it changes the date in the DB. Once this occurs, each image and album page viewed reverts the modification date of those image files.

Function used to retrieve image date: getImageDate('%B %e, %Y');

I have also tried modifying the mtime stored in the DB to match the custom date I set for a particular image. That did not work either.

Short of writing a script to modify all of the files modification dates, does anyone have any suggestions for using custom date values?

Zenphoto 1.4.4.8
PHP 5.3.15
MySQL 5.1.47
custom theme based on zp_bootstrap

sbillard

Sounds like something on your system is making Zenphoto believe the images have been changed, so it is refreshing the metadata. Since you are setting the dates manually you can just disable all the EXIF/IPTC date fields so that they will not be processed.

SierraBravoFour

Thanks for your suggestions.

On the admin Image options page I have all of the metadata fields set to "Do not process the field". The original theme had a custom option for displaying EXIF on image pages, but I did not include that in my theme, and make no calls to metadata functions on image or album pages.

I suppose I could use a code block to store my custom date.

sbillard

You certainly can use the custom data field. But really the dates should not be changing for your images. Is something going around "touching" the original images to make them look changed? If so that is probably causing you extra overhead since Zenphoto will analyze the image each time it thinks it has been changed.