Photos: cleaning up a mess

[balmhood]

Hi all,
i have a real mess in my photo collection over the years. So, I have decided to clean this up and with 13k files, I'd love some level of automation.
Some of my files are missing the EXIF Create or Original date
, however, I have found an XMP tag called Date Acquired from Microsoft that seems to have the right date in there.

[File]                File Modification Date/Time     : 2020:05:21 18:32:39+02:00
[File]                File Access Date/Time           : 2020:05:21 19:32:05+02:00
[File]                File Creation Date/Time         : 2017:12:08 09:43:18+01:00
[EXIF]              Modify Date                     : 0000:00:00 00:00:00
[EXIF]              Date/Time Original              : 0000:00:00 00:00:00
[EXIF]              Create Date                     : 0000:00:00 00:00:00
[MakerNotes]    Date Stamp Mode                 : Off
[XMP]              Date Acquired                   : 2013:01:04 13:53:05.857<=correct date

So I was thinking about doing the following:


1) Ensure I have EXIF Original = EXIF Create when either is empty
2) then, run a search on all files where EXIF Create is empty ( so original will also be empty)
3) for these, copy the Microsoft Date Acquired into both fields (skip if that field is also empty)
4) re-identify files where the EXIF Original is still empty..the ones skipped on step 3
5) populate the EXIF date fields from filename with following format: YYYYMMDD_HHMM

but i have read some of the forum but still struggle to identify the command lines to execute, so any help is appreciated
Balm

[StarGeek]

The first thing is to read FAQ #2 and FAQ #3.  Your output is showing the description names, not the actual tag names.  Also, there may be duplicate tags with the same name which won't be shown.  Adding the group in also helps to differentiate between tags of the same name.

So when listing data, it's best to use the command from FAQ #3
exiftool -a -G1 -s

If you want to just look at the time related tags, run
exiftool -a -G1 -s -time:all

When starting off, I'd suggest running one command at a time in order to get the idea of how things work rather than trying to make one all encompassing command.

And I just noticed something.  Do your files actually have time stamps set to 0000:00:00 00:00:00?  Are these image files or video files.  A zero time stamp is common for video files, but extremely odd for image files.  I'm hesitant to list any commands because there's the possibility that you have duplicate tag names with different values.

But in cases where you know that the DateAcquired tag is correct, you could run
exiftool "-AllDates<DateAcquired" /path/to/files/
AllDates is a shortcut to write to DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate, and ModifyDate all at the same time.  Exiftool will automatically skip any file that doesn't have DateAcquired set. This command creates backup files.  Add -Overwrite_Original to suppress the creation of backup files once you know everything is working correctly.  Add -r to recurse into subdirectories. 

[balmhood]

thanks a lot Stargeek, let me play around with this