When I take pictures with my digital cameras, they name the image files something like this:<\/p>\n
dscn0115.jpg<\/code><\/li>\n- My iPhone –
img_0367.jpg<\/code><\/li>\n- My Panasonic camera –
p1070126.jpg<\/code><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nI tend to let the images pile up on the cameras for a while, and then I copy them all onto our file server. I start off by dumping them all into one big folder. But then I sort them into folders based on the date and the event, with names like “pictures\/y2010\/2010-02-14_chinese_new_year<\/code>” for events and “pictures\/y2010\/2010-02<\/code>” for the random shots. I don’t mind this process, and it’s actually kind of fun to review them as I am copying them to our file server.<\/p>\nI should note as an aside, when I worked for Ericsson’s research lab in Singapore, I was talking to one of the researchers who had studied the many ways that people could organize and categorize photographs, both paper and digital. It turns out that a huge majority of people they studied tended to associate photo sets together, based on relative dates. That is, if you asked for a particular photo, they would think “that was about the same time as Bob’s birthday party, so it must have been in August”.<\/p>\n
I know that there are newer ways to organize photos, with databases and “tags” and what-not. Mac people really love to let the computer take care of those details. But I still like the idea of using folders with dates… old school<\/strong>.<\/p>\nSince I am dealing with dates and times of photos, it seems a little silly that all of my photos are named using dumb serial numbers. I find myself looking at the image’s EXIF properties, the information that the camera stores about the image — when and where the image was taken, what the camera settings were, etc. This seems a little tedious.<\/p>\n
I recently found a utility called “renrot”. It’s primary job is to read the EXIF data from a photo, and rotate the image to match the EXIF rotation flag. That is, it rewrites the image so that it will load from top-to-bottom, which makes it more compatible with less-than-intelligent viewers — like some digital picture frames. But while it’s doing that, it also renames the file based on the time and date of when the photo was taken.<\/p>\n
So now I can start by going into the directory that contains my big pile of photos and doing this:<\/p>\n
renrot --name-template %Y%m%d-%H%M%S --extension jpg *.JPG<\/pre>\nIf I wanted to be careful not to mix the iPhone pictures with the Nikon pictures, I could do this:<\/p>\n
renrot --name-template iphone-%Y%m%d-%H%M%S --extension jpg IMG_*.JPG\nrenrot --name-template nikon-%Y%m%d-%H%M%S --extension jpg DSCN*.JPG\nrenrot --name-template pan-%Y%m%d-%H%M%S --extension jpg P*.JPG<\/pre>\nIf I want to be a purist, and just rename the photos without actually rotating the image, I can do that, too.<\/p>\n
renrot --no-rotate --name-template %Y%m%d-%H%M%S --extension jpg *.JPG<\/pre>\nPretty cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I take pictures with my digital cameras, they name the image files something like this: Wife’s Nikon camera – dscn0115.jpg My iPhone – img_0367.jpg My Panasonic camera – p1070126.jpg I tend to let the images pile up on the cameras for a while, and then I copy them all onto our file server. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-tips-tricks","count-0","even alt","author-alan","last"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alanporter.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}