Photo Notes

Dec 20, 2011 Published by Tony Primerano

I have 1000s of pictures that I have been organizing, renaming and changing the dates (exif) on.

Seems each time I do this i forget where I put the pictures and what program I used to rename or edit.

If the exif data is has the correct date but the modified time on the file is wrong use jhead -ft *.jpg to change the time on the file.
to make filenames have the date from exif use jhead -n%Y%m%d-%H%M%S *.jpg
Adjust time with jhead -ta. Example. If you took a picture in 2002 but your camera was set to 2003 you can move it back 2 year with. jhead -ta-8760 -ft test.jpg
- Note -ft is so the modified time will move back also
- 8760 is the number of hours in a year
- if going over a leap year use 24 more. For example. I moved files with 2007 dates to 2008 (taken after February)
  - jhead -ta+8784 -ft *JPG

My approach

leave file names alone and set the file date to the exif setting
- jhead -ft *.jpg
See if any images are out of order when you ls -ltrthem
- Adjust dates as necessary with jhead -ta option
Once your convinced all the exif data is correct rename all files by date.
- jhead -n%Y%m%d-%H%M%S *.jpg

jhead won't help you here but you can use touch (unix/linux) to correct the dates on these files. Ex. I know these 2 AVIs are an hour ahead

ls -l --time-style=full-iso *avi
- 2007-11-04 14:06:44.000000000 -0500 MVI_0396.avi
- 2007-11-04 15:03:13.000000000 -0500 MVI_0426.avi

Lets move them back an hour. manually typing in the date

ls -l --time-style=full-iso *avi
- 2007-11-04 13:06:44.000000000 -0500 MVI_0396.avi
- 2007-11-04 14:03:13.000000000 -0500 MVI_0426.avi

yay. the dates are now correct
Todo..

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