Reorganizing photos in 1 line with exiftool

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:01:11 +0000

A few years ago I wrote a utility in Java to find all JPG files in a directory and move them into a date-based directory structure like /YYYY/MM/DD/ based on the date the photo was taken, extracted from the exif metadata in the file. Well, apparently that was a huge waste of time, as I just discovered that exiftool, an awesome perl utility I’ve used for years to edit/extract the metadata on the command line, can also do this natively. So my entire program can be replaced with this simple command:

Java utility to reorganize photos by date taken (via EXIF metadata)

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:00:37 +0000

I wrote a little utility to reorganize my digital camera pics based on the EXIF date-taken data stored in the pic. It’s pretty simple, I hacked it together in about an hour, but I thought it might be worth sharing for anyone else looking to do something similar. My camera organizes stuff as it sees fit sometimes, I am particular about my directory structure. This is probably a job best left to perl, but I don’t feel like getting Perl running on my Windows box where all the pics are. Now I can finally burn all my images to DVD.

Exif on Evan Hoffman

Reorganizing photos in 1 line with exiftool

Java utility to reorganize photos by date taken (via EXIF metadata)