Exiftool: a cool tool

I want to show a very nice tool which can help you to improve your photocollection. It is called exiftool and can be found in any linux distribution. It can be used to view the exifdata which gets saved to images. Also it can batch-replace this exifdata and batch-rename the files with that data. I want to show everything in this article.

Show exif-data

Very boring, but here:

exiftool 20140311_043419.JPG
ExifTool Version Number         : 9.12
File Name                       : 20140311_043419.JPG
Directory                       : .
File Size                       : 2.5 MB
...
...
Create Date                     : 2014:03:11 04:34:19
Max Aperture Value              : 2.8
Metering Mode                   : Multi-segment
Light Source                    : Unknown
Flash                           : Off, Did not fire
Focal Length                    : 7.9 mm
..

As you see, it will output at the beginning also some filesystem data. The most-important exif-data for me is the create date.. also maybe the gps location. But I don't have such a modern camera.

If you want to output a single item you can do:

exiftool -p '$CreateDate' a.jpg
exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d %Y a.jpg # will only output the year

Change exif-data

The only thing I need to change is a wrong Creation Date. This happens, when the date wasn't set in the camera. In this example, the date was set correctly, but not the timezone change. So I had to add 6h for every file:

exiftool -AllDates+=6 .

Change file name

My most liked use case is to change the filename to the creation time. This is useful, if you traveled in a group and want to combine multiple sets of images.

exiftool '-FileName<CreateDate' -d %Y%m%d_%H%M%S%%-c.%%e .

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