How can I incrementally date photos?

Question

I have a collection of photos that have no date information. They have no Exif data, and the file modification dates are all identical. The only sequence is in the file name: image-0001.jpg, image-0002.jpg, etc.

Now I want to assign a date to these files (preferably in Exif) that are all 10 seconds apart. I'm not so interested in what exactly the base date and time will be, just that they all increment 10 seconds. So the first image will get 0:00:00, the second 0:00:10, the third 0:00:20, etc.

Is this possible with ExifTool, or other Windows applications? We're talking about several thousands of images, so doing this manually is out of the question ;-)

Answer 1

There's already a similar question on the ExifTool forums. It can be done using two sequential ExifTool commands. First, make sure all the date to the same

exiftool -datetimeoriginal='2015:02:22 00:00:00' DIR

And then increment the time on each

exiftool '-datetimeoriginal+<0:0:${filesequence}0' DIR

This command creates backup files. Add -overwrite_original to suppress the creation of backup files. Add -r to recurse into subdirectories. If this command is run under Windows CMD, change the single quotes into double quotes.

Many of the other answers here involve looping and running exiftool once/twice per file. This is Exiftool Common Mistake #3. Exiftool's biggest performance hit is the startup time. When processing thousands of images, this will greatly increase the processing time.

Answer 2

Since the best answers use non-Windows syntax, I will here post their code converted for Microsoft Windows.

@StarGeek solution, very fast and simple:

First set a base timestamp to all images:

exiftool -datetimeoriginal="2015:01:01 12:00:00" DIR

(DIR is the name of the folder containing all images.)

Then assign incremental timestamps:

exiftool "-datetimeoriginal+<0:0:${filesequence;$_*=3}" DIR

(In this case 3 is the number of seconds you want between each photo.)

Note the use of double quotes, this is required on Windows systems.

---

@junkyardsparkle solution, which was initially the only one I was able to work with:

This requires creating a batch file, because of the commands involved.

@echo off
setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion
for %%f in (*.jpg) do (
    echo %%f
    rem Get filename
    set n=%%f
    rem Extract number
    set n=!n:~6,4!
    rem Interpret as decimal
    set /a n=1!n!-10000
    rem Convert to seconds
    set /a n = n*10
    rem Assign base timestamp
    exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="2000:1:1 00:00:00" %%f
    rem Assign time increment
    exiftool -DateTimeOriginal+="00:00:!n!" %%f
)

Answer 3

Try Irfanview. It is freeware (AFAIR) and has a very flexible batch renaming system.

Other than that I would try writing a script, something along the lines of

for X in $(seq -w 0 20) ; do
  plus=$(expr $X \* 10)
  exiftool -alldates+="0:0:0 0:0:$plus" image_$X.jpg
done

The first line creates a loop through the numbers in the file names that you have, eg. 00..20. If you have 1000 images, the command would be seq -w 0 1000. The option -w adds leading zeros to the numbers.

The second line defines the increment - 10 in this case. Without units so far.

The format string in the third line "0:0:0 0:0:$plus" defines what the variable $plus means, in this case seconds. If you wanted minutes you'd write 0:0:0 0:$plus:0. The format is "year:month:day hour:minute:second". So here, we have a 10 second increment.

This is a batch done in 'bash' (Linux shell), you might have to adapt it to Windows or use a Linux live system to do the conversion.

Note that all files should have an (identical) Exif tag (DateTimeOriginal) before this can be used, since it increments the existing tags only. But you can simply write a tag with one exiftool command.

I tested this with 20 example files and the tags were correctly written.

Answer 4

Well, I didn't post my bash answer because the question specifically asked about a Windows solution, but since two other people did, here's what I came up with:

for file in *.jpg
do
  exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1111:11:11 00:00:00" $file
  exiftool -DateTimeOriginal+="00:00:${file:6:4}0" $file
done

Avoids messing with the date command. :)

Note that in the part where it says ${file:6:4}, the "6" represents the point in the filename where the sequence number starts, and the "4" represents the length of that sequence. If your files exactly match the "image-0001.jpg, image-0002.jpg" given in the question, this will work as is; otherwise, adjust to match.