Modifying HTC Footprints timestamps.
If you have a HTC smartphone you may well have used the HTC Footprints application. This application lets you create your own virtual ‘footprints’ around the world with geo-tagged pictures, web links, timestamps and Google maps integration. It’s a pretty slick little app.
There’s a problem though, you can’t easily change the date of ‘footprints’ added after the fact. So for instance, if you get a phone tomorrow and add all of your ‘footprints’ (for which you can import your own pictures and enter the GPS locations), these will all be created with date and timestamps corresponding to when you created them, not the date of your visit to the place. I have seen many forum posts asking how you can ‘fix’ this.
Well, I have found a way. It’s simple and it works reliably on my HTC Hero with Android 1.5 and I’m pretty sure it’ll work on any other versions of Android on any other HTC phone.
To edit the dates on HTC ‘footprints’ you will need to download the SQLite Database Browser and you’ll need to use this page for converting dates into timestamps - the Epoch Converter.
To install the SQLite Database Browser you just need to unzip all of the files into a folder somewhere on your computer. Then connect your phone and ‘mount’ the SD card so it’s available on your computer as a removable drive. Now run the SQLite Database Browser program and select the ‘Open Database…’ option. Browse to the drive letter corresponding to your phone and in the .footprints folder you’ll find the footprints.db file. Select it and open it.
Now select the ‘Browse Data’ tab in the Database Browser, drop the ‘Table’ list and select ‘footprint’. You will then see all of your footprint data listed. The columns we’re interested in are then the create_time column which contains the date shown on the details page for the footprint, and the short_date column which hold the date shown in the list of footprints when first you open up the application (you may need to scroll to the extreme right to find this).
To change your footprints dates follow these steps:-
- Enter your desired date into the Epoch Converter and use the first ‘human date to timestamp’ option. You will notice that this results in a shorter string than those used in the create_time column. Don’t worry, we’ll sort that out later.
- Copy the resulting timestamp string to the copy/paste buffer.
- Double click the create_time entry you want to change and in the resulting dialog replace the old timestamp with the one just created. Now, to get the correct length of string, append three zero’s to the end of the string. Click on Apply Change to close the dialog.
- Double click the corresponding short_date field and in the resulting dialog replace the existing date with the date that matches the timestamp just created.
- Click the ‘Save’ icon at the top of the window (the floppy disc icon).
And that’s all there is to it. Next time you open up the HTC Footprints application you should see that the dates shown are those you want and not those assigned by the app when you created the footprint.
I offer this information on a “strictly at your own risk” basis so please be careful because if you make a mess of it you’re on your own. That said I have used this technique and it does work just fine as described. 
If you find it useful please feel free to comment here and say so. Also feel free to report any broken links to pages mentioned in this post. Good luck!