Ubuntu – Software to seamlessly edit multiple images

As you already have a GUI solution, I thought I would mention that there are also several ways of changing EXIF data on the command-line; two useful tools are exiftool and jhead, which can be installed with this command:

sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl jhead

With both of these tools you can operate upon multiple files at once, but you may want to back your files up before you start manipulating the exif data.

jhead

To change the time and date EXIF data on a number of files 'in a single click', you could open terminal and do cd to the folder with the pictures and run:

jhead -ts2012:10:29-10:28:03 *.jpg

The -ts switch allows you to specify the date and time required and write it to the exif header all in one go: the format specified here is YYYY:MM:DD-HH:MM:SS.

If you just wanted to change the date without specifying the time, you would use instead:

jhead -ds2012:10:29 *.jpg

You could also do it just for one some pictures taken with a particular camera if you specified, for example, -model "D70", but that option must come first in the processing, and must be something like "D70", "S100" and not "Nikon D70". Look at the exif readout from your pictures to get the correct model number.

jhead -model "D70" -ts2012:10:29-10:28:03 *.jpg

For more information, see man jhead.

exiftool

This utility has more options than jhead and is very comprehensive, as noted at the official site. There is a graphical frontend for exiftool in development, but it is in the early stages at the moment, but looks promising.

The date and time shifting options, and which formats can be used are quite extensive, as detailed here in this useful pdf. As with jhead, you can decide to change time and date, or just date. This example changes both date and time:

exiftool -AllDates="2012:03:14 12:25:00" *.jpg

The example above just sets a particular value for the date and times of the pictures; if you wanted to just shift them all by a certain time index, such as the three years forward, you could use:

exiftool -AllDates+="3:0:0 0" *.jpg

The shifting feature can be very useful if, as has happened to you, your pictures are all suddenly marked 2009, even though they were taken in 2012. Make sure you use a plus or minus sign before the equals (as in -AllDates-= or -AllDates+=), depending on what you want to achieve when you assign your required time index, or the resulting EXIF data will not be as expected.

exiftool will create a backup of the original before editing the EXIF data adding original at the end of the filename.

exiftool supports more image types than jhead which only works for JPEGs.

For more information, see man exiftool.

This can be done from terminal. How to Quickly Resize, Convert & Modify Images from the Linux Terminal:

ImageMagick will try to preserve the aspect ratio if you use this command. It will alter the image to fit within a 200×100 area, but the image may not be exactly 200×100. If you want to force the image to become a specific size – even if it messes up the aspect ratio – add an exclamation point to the dimensions:

convert example.png -resize 200×100! example.png

You can also use GIMP.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

^{Source: http://docs.gimp.org/en/introduction.html}

To install GIMP, you can run

sudo apt-get install gimp