using regexp as list of input files to exiftool

[djholco]

I am doing a lot of old photos and slides where I have to put in metadata almost by hand. Several files will have the same -createdate for example. The naming system for files that I use will have those files in sequence, e.g. TEST01.jpg, TEST02.jpg, .... TEST09.jpg, TEST10.jpg. Typically I will want to add the metadata to a subset, such as TEST02.jpg, TEST03.jpg, TEST04.jpg, that cannot be designated by using the WINDOWS wildcards * and ?. The following used to work in a CMD window:

EXIFTOOL -createdate="2016:01:01" *0[2-4].jpg

Essentially the pattern from a regexp was used to pass in the list to EXIFTOOL. I used this approach a lot so I know it worked. But after a hiatus of several months from pictures, I started working again and this no longer works.

Curiously, under Powershell,  a similar command will work with dir, but not EXIFTOOL

DIR /b  *0[2-4].jpg

TEST02.jpg
TEST03. jpg
TEST04.jpg

Something has changed either in EXIFTOOL or CMD. Any ideas? There are other ways to do this task, but require some rewriting. I upgraded to exiftool ver 10.70 in early December but don't know if that is when this capability went away.

64 bit, Windows 10 Pro, Ver. 1709,  build 16299.192
exiftool 10.70

[Phil Harvey]

Unlike other platforms, in windows the wildcards are handled by the application, so this would be a change in ExifTool.  Currently ExifTool calls File::Glob to do this.  This hasn't changed for a long while, but certainly very old versions of ExifTool did this differently.  More recently I have updated the version of File::Glob in the exiftool package.  Do you know what version you were using?

- Phil

[djholco]

thanks for quick reply. I have two older versions of exiftool that I kept and renamed as I updated exiftool. Version 8.1.8.0 and 9.8.0.0.  Version 9.8.0.0 was the version I was using when the regexp pattern worked, but I believe it also worked under the older 8.1.8.0.

I have tried using one of the older versions but the command no longer works. That may be because supporting software, libraries, etc, does not get reinstalled? By the way, I use the stand-alone windows executable and rename exiftool (-k) .exe --> exiftool.exe.

A separate thank you for the amazing feat of putting a usable interface between us users and the data monstrosity that is metadata.

[Phil Harvey]

All supporting libraries come with each exiftool version, so something else must have changed if the older version of exiftool behaves differently now.  The only thing I can think of is that before you were using a shell that expands the wildcards.  As far as I know, cmd.exe does not do this, and never did, but perhaps PowerShell or something else does.

- Phil

[djholco]

OK. Some problems are not worth the work to solve them.

I have always used the default CMD shell in Windows so that is not the cause.

I will either switch over to Powershell and use the DIR command which does the expansion, pipe it into a file, and use that as input to exiftool. Or use the IF command which also expands regular expressions.

Thanks for looking into this.

[djholco]

OOPS. I made a stupid mistake when I thought I had reinstalled exiftool 9.80.

When I did it properly, the regular expression expansion works just fine, as it always did. So it looks to me like FILE::GLOB may be the problem as that is the only relevant thing that has changed.

I downloaded the oldest version that is still on SourceForge, ver 10.55, and it does not expand the regex.

If there is a reliable source where the older versions are still available I could work my way back until I find the update where expansion ceased to work.

[Phil Harvey]

OK, thanks.  I can probably figure out what broke this for you.  I suspect it was when I added better Unicode file name support in Windows.  Unfortunately though, if it is a choice between Unicode support or this, then Unicode probably wins.  But I will look to see if I can make both work.

- Phil