Wisdom pearls

Yesterday I had to rename with a unique and chronological code some photos made by different cameras but among the same holidays.

I remembered about the EXIF informaztion set which is inside any camera-generated jpg file... and I remembered of a tool to work with these information.

So I installed exiv2 on my Arch box and with a rapid sight to the "man" I was ready to batch renaming all the pictures. I thought I would have been quite complicated but it worked like a charm! Here you are the command:

On a terminal, once you are in the folder containing the photo to be renamed, you have to do only:

$ exiv2 mv ./*.jpg

It's incredible how rapidly is done a work that could take a full day for a human! All the pictures in the folder are now renamed witha strandard patterna like the following:

YYYYMMDD_hhmmss.jpg

So now instead of having different folder for different cameras to prevent to overwrite or mess up the pictures, you have all the photos in the same place and time-tagged.

But there is some issue because anything could be perfect.

First of all, this program doesn't work with the movie files, so you will have to rename them manually.

The real problem is, anyway, when we do more than 1 shot per seconds (multiple shot feature of professional cameras) or when we shot at the same time with the two different camera we are trying to merge.

However, being careful about these situations before the renaming and the merging of the folders the system works very well... if the time on set on the cameras is correct and more or less synchronized. If there will be a delay of some 5 minutes all the consequential order will be badly disrupted.

For the windows users: I didn't check if there is such an EXIF utility for your OS... but I'm quite sure I will be... at most it won't be free of charge... but that's your way to think sofware doesn't it? :-P

Make nice pictures and Have good holidays!

bYe,
Andy

Sent from my iPhone