Photo Renamer

What the script does

This script is fairly specific. It renames all JPG files (technically files with a .jpg or .jpeg extenstion) in a given directory to the form IMG_*yyyymmdd*_*hhmmss*.jpg

Rationale

The naming pattern described above is the naming pattern used by the stock Android camera.Renaming photos taken with other devices to this scheme allows me to seamlessly merge photos into a single directory and maintain consistent file names.

Extracting the date

exif meta data

Per default we now use the JPEG exif meta data to find the creation date of the file. This gives much more reliable results than using the mtime of the file.

The case that convinced me this change was necessary:

I wanted to rename images that was recovered after being deleted. The recovery process changed the mtime of the files, but the meta data remained intact.

mtime

It is still possible to find the date with mtime using the -f command line switch, but using the exif metadata is the highly preferred method.

~~After some experimenting I found that if I copy photos from my camera's memory card to my PC the "Modify Time" field gets preserved. Therefore I use this field as the basis for renaming the files. Obviously if you modify the file before renaming the mtime field will get updated and your file name will be wrong, so be warned!~~

~~IMPORTANT NOTE~~ ~~Since I am renaming files based on the date created by the device that captured the image, this device's date should be correctly set. (For the next release I want to add more options to manually set the date)~~

Installation

Dependencies

Since version 0.1.0 we use exif metadata to get the file creation date by default. We use the ruby library mini_exiftool which has a dependency on exiftool.

exiftool should be easily installable through the package manager of most distributions.

Arch Linux