Command Line EXIF – Rename Images to EXIF Time for Unique Filenames

command lineexif

If I rename images via exiv to the exif date time, I do the following:

find . -iname \*jpg -exec exiv2 -v -t -r '%Y_%m_%d__%H_%M_%S' rename {} \;

Now it might happen that pictures have exactly the same timestamp (including seconds). How can I make the filename unique automatically?

The command should be stable in the sense that if I execute it on the same directory structure again (perhaps after adding new pictures), the pictures already renamed shouldn't change and if pictures with already existing filenames are added the new filenames should be unique as well.

My first attempt was just to leave the original basename in the resulting filename, but then the command wouldn't be stable in the sense above.

Best Answer

You may want to try jhead instead which does that out-of-the-box (with a, b... z suffixes allowing up to 27 files with the same date) and doesn't have the stability issue mentioned by @meuh:

find . -iname '*jpg' -exec jhead -n%Y_%m_%d__%H_%M_%S {} +

Or using exiftool (example in man page):

exiftool -ext jpg '-FileName<CreateDate' -d %Y_%m_%d__%H_%M_%S%%-c.%%e .

(here with %-c being a numerical suffix starting with -)

Related Solutions

Rename Photos – How to Rename Photos Using EXIF Data?

You can to it for all files using a for loop (in the shell/in a shell-script):

for i in *.JPG; do
  j=`jhead "$i" | grep date | sed 's/^File date[^:]\+: \(.\+\)$/\1/'`.jpg
  echo mv -i "$i" "$j"
done

This is just a very basic outline. Delete echo when you have verified that everything works as expected.

How to sort a list of files by time, given only the filenames

Assuming your input is small, and the file names don't contain spaces or other weird characters, you can just use ls.

ls -dt $(cat files)

$(cat files) puts the contents of files on the command line, and splits them on whitespace to get a list of arguments. ls -t takes a list of files as its arguments, sorts them by mtime, and prints them. -d is needed so it lists directories using their name, rather than their contents.

If that's not sufficient, you can try the decorate/sort/undecorate pattern, e.g.

$ while IFS=$'\n' read file; do
    printf '%d %s\n' "$(stat -c +%Y "$file")" "$file"
  done <files | sort -k1nr | cut -f 2- -d ' ' >files.sorted

where IFS=$'\n' read file; do ... done <files sets file to each newline-delimited entry in files in turn, printf...stat... turns <filename> into <mtime> <filename>, sort -k1nr sorts lines based on the first field in reverse numeric order, then cut removes the <mtime>, leaving you with just <filename>s in sorted order.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Rename Photos – How to Rename Photos Using EXIF Data?

How to sort a list of files by time, given only the filenames

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