Take a picture with a digital camera and it’ll normally be tagged with the date and time, often useful later when searching or organising your images.

If the camera clock is wrong, though, all your photos will have the wrong EXIF time stamp, and they’ll stay that way until someone notices.

As the images will always be out by a consistent amount then you could try to solve this later by figuring out the day/ hour/ minute offset, and manually adding it to/ subtracting it from each image in turn.

Alternatively, you might just use EXIF ReGenerate to run the necessary calculations and update all your photos with a click.

The program requires installation, unfortunately, which seems a little pointless for something you might use once only. But at least there’s no adware or other payload you’ll regret later.

Set the correct time for one photo and EXIF ReGenerate applies the same offset to everything else

Open your target images and EXIF ReGenerate displays them in thumbnail form, along with their time stamps. For some reason the developer thought it was a good idea to do this in a narrow vertical stack, about 450×1160 pixels on our test system. The window can’t be maximised or resized, and this meant we could only see the first six of our test photos (viewing the rest required scrolling).

If you want to adjust every image, though, this doesn’t matter much. Just click Select All (or press Ctrl+A) and they’ll all be checked.

Next, find an image where you’re confident you know the correct time it was taken, then click Set, give it a new date and time, click Adjust > Close.

EXIF ReGenerate now calculates the time offset for that image, and clicking “Apply to all” (the green “tick” icon on the toolbar) adjusts the EXIF time stamp in all your selected images by the same amount.

Its interface is poor, and we wish the program was portable, but EXIF ReGenerate did work for us, quickly fixing an entire folder of mis-tagged photos. If you have an EXIF emergency then it’s (just about) worth a look.