MacDive Forums

As I mentioned in a previous thread, I have had difficulties getting the timestamps on my photos to match MacDive. They are supposedly the same Time Zone that MacDive is using and I have corrected the times in Photos app, but they are not uploading as I expect and hit the dive's timeline in places I don't expect. I have been messing with Camera Time Compensation to fix the issue, but I think a visual representation of where the photos will be inserted to the target dives BEFORE the upload is committed would be great.

I envision a dive profile with picture icons overlaid on the profile (just like the final looks now) with information displayed regarding how many photos will not be imported because they're outside the dive's timeline. From there, I'd like to either use a slider to move the photos so that they fit in the dive timeline like I want, or manually adjust the current Camera Time Compensation to accomplish the same thing. Once the manual adjustments are complete, the upload can be committed.

The thing I usually do is check the time my dive comp is set to and the time my camera is set to, then batch-adjust the images to compensate, because I always forget to change my camera. This does the lot, then they add as expected.

Adding what you've suggested is a cool idea, but a significant amount of work. It's been suggested before, it would be cool to add if I found time, but no promises.

Yeah, I get it.

I've got something going on where the Mac and cameras not only have slightly different times, but the cameras have different TZ offsets that can't be adjusted from the camera's interface. I fully understand why compensating for other products' bad user experience is not on your list of high priorities.

For those of you facing this issue, I now take a picture of the dive computer at the beginning of the dive and use an EXIF reader to compare the time differential between that image and the dive computer.

Maybe an easier addition for you, Nick, at some point, would be to display the EXIF timestamp for the first image in the folder before MacDive uploads the images on the Camera Time Compensation settings box?

Man, I have three beers and then I try and line up my camera and dive comp display manually. That sounds WAY too high tech..

But in all seriousness, I guess what you're asking would be cool if it was more like an initial scan with a preview of "here's how it might look" and then allowing you to offset until it looked more correct. That's just.. a much more complicated interface than currently exists, and is non-trivial to build.

I'm not actually sure if there is any programmatic notification of when you've changed folder in the open dialog prior to clicking begin (that's just a standard Apple dialog), so I'm not sure if it could just be easily hacked in either. I will have a look and see if there's anything I can do to make it simpler. Your idea is good, just not sure if it's actually feasible.

My window between beers two & four is very narrow.

Thanks for looking into it. Obviously, if it presents itself as PITA with diminishing returns, feel free to trash the idea.

I made the effort to time sync all of the computers and cameras before today's dive and mostly only had to deal with TZ offsets today.

Tip: Start the dive with taking a picture of your dive computer, then you will have the exact time difference between the camera and the computer.

Other tip (what I aleways do): Sync computer to your mac (this usually updates time), and sync camera with it's iphone-companion-app. Most modern cameras have this, and this operation also tends to set time correct on the camera.