-AllDates<Filename (special formatting)

[matthew]

Hello, everyone. I've used this wonderful tool on and off over the years to make minor corrections here and there to some of my images, but I'm feeling a little overwhelmed trying to figure out if I made a mistake in how I've named thousands of photos I've recently scanned.

I'd like to use this command with some formatting to parse out the date from the filename and insert it into the date fields: -AllDates<Filename

My issues is that I have my files named like so:

• 1992-01-08_Scan001.tif
• 1992-01-08_Scan002.tif
• 1992-01-08_Scan003.tif
• 1992-01-08_Scan004.tif
• 1992-01-20_Scan001.tif
• 1992-01-20_Scan002.tif
• 1992-01-xx_Scan001.tif
• 1992-01-xx_Scan002.tif

So YYYY-MM-DD then just the word 'scan' and a sequential number to keep them from overwriting.

For most of my photos, it could be workable if I ignore everything after 'scan', but my issue comes in with photos that have no date listed (just year and month). For those, I used xx as the date listed since I don't know it.

My dream solution is to use use the -AllDates<Filename command for just the date and have it ignore the numbers after the word 'scan'. I'm not sure if I should treat the XX like 01 or if we can set YYYY-MM without a date.

I'm open to learning, but not sure where I can go to practice and learn the syntax to parse this out.

Thanks for your time.

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Matthew,

This should work:

exiftool "-alldates<${filename;s/xx/01/;s/_.*//}000000" DIR

This changes any "xx" to "01" for the first of the month, then removes everything after "_" and adds back 000000 for HHMMSS.  You may want to add -ext tif to process only .tif files, -r to recurse into subdiretories, and -P to preserve the file modification time.  And maybe -overwrite_original to avoid saving the original files (but you should have other backups in this case).  AllDates is a shortcut for CreateDate, DateTimeOriginal and ModifyDate, which are the right ones to set for .tif files.

- Phil

[matthew]

Hi Matthew,

This should work:

exiftool "-alldates<${filename;s/xx/01/;s/_.*//}000000" DIR

This changes any "xx" to "01" for the first of the month, then removes everything after "_" and adds back 000000 for HHMMSS.  You may want to add -ext tif to process only .tif files, -r to recurse into subdiretories, and -P to preserve the file modification time.  And maybe -overwrite_original to avoid saving the original files (but you should have other backups in this case).  AllDates is a shortcut for CreateDate, DateTimeOriginal and ModifyDate, which are the right ones to set for .tif files.

- Phil

Wow. I cannot thank you enough for the tool and for helping me with this issue. This is going to be so helpful for my wife and I.

I hope you have a great night.

[matthew]

Hi Matthew,

This should work:

exiftool "-alldates<${filename;s/xx/01/;s/_.*//}000000" DIR

This changes any "xx" to "01" for the first of the month, then removes everything after "_" and adds back 000000 for HHMMSS.  You may want to add -ext tif to process only .tif files, -r to recurse into subdiretories, and -P to preserve the file modification time.  And maybe -overwrite_original to avoid saving the original files (but you should have other backups in this case).  AllDates is a shortcut for CreateDate, DateTimeOriginal and ModifyDate, which are the right ones to set for .tif files.

Maybe some of the date field's aren't available for tif files?
-time:all -s gives me

FileModifyDate                  : 2023:05:25 20:30:16-04:00
FileAccessDate                  : 2024:03:09 16:02:03-05:00
FileCreateDate                  : 2024:03:09 15:56:19-05:00
ProfileDateTime                : 2006:02:02 02:20:00



- Phil

Sorry to bump the thread, but the code on Windows is throwing an error and not updating.

Warning: No writable tags set from ./1991-02-12_Scan001.tif
Warning: Invalid tag name '000000'. Use '=' not '<' to assign a tag value - ./1991-02-12_Scan001.tif
    0 image files updated
    1 image files unchanged


Edit:
using -time:all -s I learned that .tif only has:
FileModifyDate
FileAccessDate
FileCreateDate
ProfileDateTime

Trying to change the code to just update FileCreateDate still fails.
PS C:\Users\Matt\Desktop\Images> exiftool "-filecreatedate<${filename;s/xx/01/;s/_.*//}000000" .\1991-02-12_Scan001.tif -ext tif -overwrite_original
Warning: No writable tags set from ./1991-02-12_Scan001.tif
Warning: Invalid tag name '000000'. Use '=' not '<' to assign a tag value - ./1991-02-12_Scan001.tif
    0 image files updated
    1 image files unchanged


Edit2:
Even trying to simplify the command and calling out an exact field that I know exists fails.

PS C:\Users\Matt\Desktop\Images> exiftool -FileModifyDate<"${filename;s/xx/01/;s/_.*//}" 1991-02-12_Scan001.tif -v
======== 1991-02-12_Scan001.tif
Setting new values from 1991-02-12_Scan001.tif
Warning: No writable tags set from 1991-02-12_Scan001.tif
Nothing changed in 1991-02-12_Scan001.tif
    0 image files updated
    1 image files unchanged

[StarGeek]

Trying to change the code to just update FileCreateDate still fails.
PS C:\Users\Matt\Desktop\Images> exiftool "-filecreatedate<${filename;s/xx/01/;s/_.*//}000000" .\1991-02-12_Scan001.tif -ext tif -overwrite_original

Use CMD, not PowerShell.  Or try and figure out how PS wants the command to be quoted, because it treats quoted options differently than every other type of command line. I've given up dealing with PS because of all the problems it has.

[matthew]

Trying to change the code to just update FileCreateDate still fails.
PS C:\Users\Matt\Desktop\Images> exiftool "-filecreatedate<${filename;s/xx/01/;s/_.*//}000000" .\1991-02-12_Scan001.tif -ext tif -overwrite_original

Use CMD, not PowerShell.  Or try and figure out how PS wants the command to be quoted, because it treats quoted options differently than every other type of command line. I've given up dealing with PS because of all the problems it has.

Thank you! I'll give this a shot tonight. I'm so used to using Linux that I forgot there was a difference between power shell and CMD. Hopefully that's the issue.


Edit: It worked. Can't believe I mixed up Powershell and CMD... Thanks again!