Hi,
I have managed to totally destroy the integrity of my photo library mixing thumbnails, masters and god knows what else. In looking to see how I might recover from this I have come to the decision I need to use two tools. Exiftools and Hazel. I can see that various images have different data that I can use to resort and recover from my mistake. I am hoping Exiftools can be used to extract data from the images and I can use Hazel to organise my files again.
To use the together I have to use Exiftools in the conditional rules of Hazel that requires a script. I was going to use various fields in the Exif Data to sort my mess. As such I have no idea on if Exiftools can be used in this way. I also have no idea on how to correctly write a script. I was thinking of something like this:
if [ $(exiftool -DateTimeOriginal $1) == "" ]
then
Exit 1
else
Exit 0
fi
I know this does not work. I am using this example as I believe all the thumbnails I have mixed in with the masters DO NOT contain anything in the DateTimeOriginal field. You get the idea.
Can this be done? If so help...... :-[ :-[
First, it's ExifTool, not ExifTools.
If you want to use ExifTool to perform a condition, this is the way to do it:
exiftool -if '$datetimeoriginal' -aaa FILE
where FILE is the name of a file. Here I use bogus tag Aaa so exiftool doesn't return anything.
the exit value from exiftool will be 0 if DateTimeOriginal existed, or 1 if it didn't.
I'm not sure what you have Hazel doing to organize your images, but if it helps you can use ExifTool to move and/or rename files, and do this easily on entire directories:
exiftool -if '$datetimeoriginal' '-directory=/home/Strop/no_metadata' DIR
or if you want to isolate the small thumbnails:
exiftool -if '$imagewidth < 200' -directory=/home/Strop/pictures/thumbnails /home/Strop/pictures/big_mess
- Phil
Phil,
thank you very much for your assistance. I will try the examples you have given me and hopefully all will be good.
Sorry about the name
Laurie