Monday, January 17

EXIF data script

Happy Monday! The cold front broke yesterday, and now all of Great Falls is basking in the balmy 40ºF. Too bad. I love every part of the "bitter" cold, except the heat bill.

Anyway, I spent much of yesterday arm deep in my *nix box (Mandrake 10.1), trying to write a regular expression that would help organize my image directory. I just rebuilt the machine, and when I tranferred over my files, the file date/time was adjusted to system date/time of the transfer.

Anyway, I want write a script that will parse out the EXIF image creation date/time for every file in my image directory (including the entire subdirectory structure), and change the file date to the EXIF date. I would also like the file name prepended with the YYYY_MM_DD-hh_mm in those EXIF headers. The script should look at every file in the directory and only adjust those with a valid EXIF header. Because of the different programs/devices used to capture images, it should be able to find images with non-standard file extensions (i.e., *.JPG; *.jpg; *.jpeg; etc.)

I played around with jhead, to no avail so far. Any ideas?

2 comments:

david said...

Sigh...yeah, it's a bit sad to watch the snow melting before my very eyes...the only thing that keeps me going is the chance for MORE snow soon! Not this week, though...forecasters say not until (at least) next week. Sigh.

Treasure State Jew said...

David, according to my wife, the lot of us cold-lovers are "sick in the head."