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ExifTool Cheatsheet for organising photos


ExifTool is an incredibly powerful piece of software that reads, writes, and edits metadata to and from files. It is a command-line tool that to start with can look very complicated but I tend to re-use the same snippets over and over.

It’s worth noting; that this is a personal note, it’s not a tutorial - it’s somewhere I can dump my snippets to use later.

Filenames based on timestamps

Rename all files recursively from the current dir to YEAR-MONTH-DAY_HOURSMINSSECS.ext eg: 2020-06-10_093033.jpg

exiftool "-FileName<datetimeoriginal" -d "%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S%%-c.%%e" -r  $PWD/${1#./}