ExifTool Forum
ExifTool => Newbies => Topic started by: faj2323 on March 25, 2020, 11:42:45 PM
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Having scanned my collection of 18,000+ (mostly railway-related) slides some years ago, I've decided I'd like to revisit them and insert metadata, thus capturing the captions I originally wrote on those slides.
The files are to be renamed in the format YYMMDD-NNN Short description.JPG, e.g. 720706-001 S307 Lara.jpg . [Here, S307 is the locomotive number.]
After studying a lot of code snippets, I've worked out how to write the first part of the filename to DateTimeOriginal, then write the short description to the Description field. Then I append DateTimeOriginal to Description, using the abbreviated month name (with thanks to the helpful post by demianill on January 31, 2020.)
The command I'm using to achieve this is:
-d "%d %b. %Y." "-Description<${filename;$_=substr($_,11);s/\..*?$//}, $datetimeoriginal" -ext jpg .
which produces a description (using the above example) of:
S307 Lara, 06 Jul. 1972.
I referred to http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strftime.3.html for the date formats.
Better still, I'd like to drop the leading zero where the day is less than 10. I would then have "S307 Lara, 6 Jul. 1972." The date format code for this is %e .
However, the %e code won't write the date at all - I'm just getting "S307 Lara,"
I've seem to have the syntax basically right (because %d works) - have I missed something?
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See Common Date Format Codes (https://exiftool.org/filename.html#codes) for the list for exiftool. If you're on Windows, a few of those don't work. The date codes are system dependent. %e may work on linux or mac, but not on Windows.
You can trim the leading zeroes by using this for your DateTimeOriginal
${DateTimeOriginal;s/^0+//}
Or see my old thread (https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=4087.0) for a user-defined tag (which I'm still using to this day).
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Aha - so that's what it was. I saw a link to the linux page somewhere in the exiftool documentation, and looked at that instead of the exiftool Common Date Format Codes.
That works perfectly -- thanks.
Once I'd more-or-less figured out your code, I took it a step further by doing this:
${DateTimeOriginal;s/^0+//;s/May./May/}
which removes the minor cosmetic issue of having a full stop after "May".
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Once I'd more-or-less figured out your code, I took it a step further by doing this:
${DateTimeOriginal;s/^0+//;s/May./May/}
which removes the minor cosmetic issue of having a full stop after "May".
Other options would include
Changing your original command from $_=substr($_,11) to $_=substr($_,10) so you don't grab the dot in the first place.
Using the BaseName tag in the example.config file (https://exiftool.org/config.html).
Using regex in the original filename to drop the extension
${filename;s/\.[^.]*$//}