Beware Photo Booth time stamps: It's a bug, not a feature.
One of our readers informed us that he was seeing some strangeness with Photo Booth time stamps. Photo Booth is the built-in Mac app that lets you grab stills or video from your iSight or attached USB or Firewire camera. It does the job dutifully, and with no issues... until now.Beginning on or about December 27, the app started creating file names that are exactly one year in the future. It's not getting the creation date wrong, that's just fine. But Photo Booth is now giving files names like 2010-12-29 at 11.00.
It's not the end of the world, but if you are looking to find a file by date in the name, you're sure to be confused. The bug appears in Snow Leopard, and I haven't been able to determine if it appears in other, older versions of the OS.
If you want to check the bug for yourself, take a snapshot with Photo Booth, and then look inside the Photo Booth folder inside the Pictures folder in your user directory. Let us know what you find.
Perhaps Apple should re-name the app "Time Machine II."
[Thanks to Oliver for the tip]
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One of our readers informed us that he was seeing some strangeness with Photo Booth time stamps. Photo Booth is the built-in Mac app that...
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Same bug...just checked....am running on 10.6.2 Unibody Silver Macbook
December 31 2009 at 10:18 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI see the same thing as mactel istat menus calendar is also showing a december 2010 calendar along with the photobooth issue
December 30 2009 at 10:14 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI am getting the glitch on my White MacBook (Early 2008) with 10.6.2 http://twitpic.com/vwfu6
December 30 2009 at 1:28 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply
Turns out this has got to do with code. If using YYYY instead of yyyy, the year returned is magically not necessarily the current year, but the year of which current week is week #1 (and this week is week #1 of 2010).
Why that feature even exists is beyond me, but some developer obviously mistakenly wrote YYYY in his code instead of yyyy hence getting the wrong year in photo booth. This week only, mind you. Next week it will all be back to normal.
(I found this out from the WebIS website, they obviously made the same mistake with their calendar app Pocket Informant. See http://www.pocketinformant.com/Forums/index.php?showtopic=15909 )
Same here
http://naija-konnect.com/hots-on-the-web/
Files are named correctly for me
mac OS 10.6.2
German language an location
PhotoBooth 3.0.1
No Problems
I noticed the same problem with iChat logs, for what it's worth. Glad there's a reason, even if it's lame. :-)
~Trav
Confirmed in Photo Booth and iStat Menus.
MacBookPro5,1 (Jan 2009) upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6 (in case that differentiates from those who don't have the problem)
OS X 10.6.2
Photo Booth Version 3.0.1 (117)
It's a cross-promotional thing for the Doctor Who Special "End of Time".
It started happening just after Part 1 aired and will be resolved at the conclusion of Part 2.
Using an iMac iSight G5 running 10.5.8, my date shows as it should. My photo's info simply says:
Today @ 18:22
and my clock is correct, as December 29, 2009.
So, no problems here.
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