[Q] DropBox USB sync with external card & incorrect EXIF info for videos

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ronx162

Member
Feb 12, 2010
39
8
Arlington, VA
Hey all,

I've noticed a couple of issues that are driving me crazy in trying to keep my pics/vids synced. The first issue is one I also had with my SGS3 in that DropBox USB sync will not work with my external sdcard. It only looks in /sdcard/DCIM/Camera (or /Phone/DCIM/Camera like it appears in Windows when connected via MTP). I had decided to store pics/vids on internal memory on my S3 since it came with a generous 32 GB internal, and I'd just move them over to the external card periodically after I had synced them to dropbox via USB. With the S5, 16 GB doesn't stretch very far with the larger sizes of the files, so I'm storing on my 64 GB external card. Has anyone ever figured out how to get dropbox USB sync to pull from the external card? This used to work fine with my Incredible and original Droid before that, so I'm guessing it has something to do with the Samsung partition structure or maybe MTP.

So I decided to turn on auto upload in the Dropbox app. That seemed to work fine at first, but I started noticing that my videos would be out of order from the pictures. On closer inspection, I noticed that the video filenames were using a timestamp 4 hours ahead of when I took the picture. I'm in EST, which is currently GMT-4, so it looks like the video filenames were using GMT time. I used exiftool to inspect the exif info and noticed that the videos are being tagged with QuickTime-prefaced times that are in GMT. The only time available that appears correct is the FileModifyDate. Has anyone noticed this? Can anyone confirm that their videos are being tagged with GMT timestamps as well? If not, I wonder if I somehow missed a setting somewhere that would solve this problem. For now, I'm forced to manually rename all video files after they are uploaded to dropbox (or batch rename with exiftool; still a pain in the @ss).

Thanks for any info or confirmation ;)
 

ronx162

Member
Feb 12, 2010
39
8
Arlington, VA
I meant to include the exif comparison (see below). The first one is a video file. This video was taken at 11:43 AM EST (i.e. the FileModifyDate). However, all of the other dates are 4 hours ahead. The second one is a picture, which is tagged correctly.

C:\Users\ronx\Dropbox\Camera Uploads>exiftool -time:all -a -G0:1 -s "2014-08-18 15.43.52.mp4"
[File:System] FileModifyDate : 2014:08:18 11:43:52-04:00
[File:System] FileAccessDate : 2014:08:18 12:10:45-04:00
[QuickTime] CreateDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52
[QuickTime] ModifyDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52
[QuickTime:Track1] TrackCreateDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52
[QuickTime:Track1] TrackModifyDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52
[QuickTime:Track1] MediaCreateDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52
[QuickTime:Track1] MediaModifyDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52
[QuickTime:Track2] TrackCreateDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52
[QuickTime:Track2] TrackModifyDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52
[QuickTime:Track2] MediaCreateDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52
[QuickTime:Track2] MediaModifyDate : 2014:08:18 15:43:52

C:\Users\ronx\Dropbox\Camera Uploads>exiftool -time:all -a -G0:1 -s "2014-08-12 08.07.29.jpg"
[File:System] FileModifyDate : 2014:08:12 08:07:29-04:00
[File:System] FileAccessDate : 2014:08:13 12:15:49-04:00
[EXIF:IFD0] ModifyDate : 2014:08:12 08:07:29
[EXIF:ExifIFD] DateTimeOriginal : 2014:08:12 08:07:29
[EXIF:ExifIFD] CreateDate : 2014:08:12 08:07:29
 

ronx162

Member
Feb 12, 2010
39
8
Arlington, VA
bump.

is anyone able to at least verify that their sgs5 is also tagging videos with incorrect exif timestamps? at least that would make me feel a little better (maybe). thanks!