Sort pictures based on Exif date

Recently, I bumped into a problem: I had received pictures from the same event from three different sources (cameras). How could I sort these based on when the pictures were taken?

A small Perl script are born to the rescue. The program "jhead" dumps Exif data contained in JPEG images. Running jhead on a image without options gives:

$ jhead IMG_1195.JPG

File name : IMG_1195.JPG

File size : 2988387 bytes

File date : 2007:03:04 15:37:34

Camera make : Canon

Camera model : Canon DIGITAL IXUS 800 IS

Date/Time : 2007:02:22 19:17:14

Resolution : 2816 x 2112

Flash used : Yes (auto)

Focal length : 5.8mm (35mm equivalent: 37mm)

CCD width : 5.72mm

Exposure time: 0.017 s (1/60)

Aperture : f/2.8

Whitebalance : Auto

Metering Mode: matrix

The "Date/Time" header gives the time stamp. Renaming the file to the date, would make it easy to sort the pictures in time based on filename:

IMG_1195.JPG --> 20070222_191714.jpg

Instead of manually renaming a couple of hundred images, Perl can do the job:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

#

# filename: exif_date_sort.pl

#

# Small utility that renames pictures based on the Exif date.

#

# Date: Sun Mar 4 19:13:42 CET 2007

#

# Lars Strand

#

use strict;

use File::Glob qw(:globally :nocase);

use File::Copy;

die "Usage: $0 PATH" if $#ARGV < 0; 

while (@ARGV) { 

   my @filelist = glob($ARGV[0]."*.jpg"); 

   foreach my $file (@filelist) { 

       for my $line (`jhead "$file"`) { 

           if ($line =~ /^Date\/Time\s*:\s*(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)\s*(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)/) { 

              print "$file --> $1$2$3_$4$5$6.jpg\n";

              copy("$file", "$1$2$3_$4$5$6.jpg") or die "Error: Copy failed: $!";

           }

       }

  }

  shift @ARGV;

}

The script takes one or more directories as argument. Every JPG file that has a Exif date header, are copied to a new "date-filename".

Running it gives the following output:

$ ~/exif_date_sort.pl 200702-Veggli/

200702-Veggli/IMG_1196.JPG --> 20070222_194000.jpg

200702-Veggli/IMG_1197.JPG --> 20070222_194007.jpg

200702-Veggli/IMG_1198.JPG --> 20070222_194012.jpg

200702-Veggli/IMG_1200.JPG --> 20070222_194437.jpg

200702-Veggli/IMG_1201.JPG --> 20070222_194443.jpg

200702-Veggli/IMG_1202.JPG --> 20070222_194643.jpg

200702-Veggli/IMG_1203.JPG --> 20070222_194844.jpg

...

.. or, as I'll learned later, you can just alias jhead to:

jhead-iso is aliased to `jhead -n%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S'