Piping filename

[Archive]

[Originally posted by crosschk on 2009-12-16 15:52:25-08]

What I would like to do it to force EXIFtool to rename files in order of date taken and having the seq number using the %-3nc command so the output would be something like

month-day-year.cr2

month-day-year 002.cr2

month-day-year 003.cr2

I know how to get it to name the files with a seq number so as to not over write files. but when I do this it does not seem to be in date/time order so the seq number is not necessarily the correct order. But by sorting a list of files names I hope to circumvent this issue by spoon feeding exiftools the file names

I worked out this

Code:

ls -lt|exiftool '-FileName<CreateDate' -d %Y%m%d%-3nc.%%e

Would this work? I plan on having my script go back and rename the first file with a 001.cr2 after the rest of the files are processed

I would try it now but I am not near my linux machine

If that is not the correct way, can someone point me in the right direction

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2009-12-16 18:23:42-08]

Close, but your pipe won't quite work as written.  The
problem of course is that ExifTool processes files in the
order they appear on the command line, or the order
of the directory listing if a directory name is specified.
But the order of files in a directory is system dependent,
but on Linux I thought this should always be in alphabetical
order.  But to be sure you are processing alphabetically you
could do something like this in Linux:

Code:

exiftool `ls *.jpg | sort`

Here I use backticks to place the output of the embedded
commands into the command line.  Your pipe would have
passed the output to the exiftool standard input, which
isn't what you wanted.

As well, you could go through a text file and sort the
files however you want.  ie)

Code:

1) ls > files.txt
2) <edit files.txt as necessary to achieve the desired order>
3) exiftool -@ files.txt

I hope this helps.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by crosschk on 2009-12-16 18:58:18-08]

Thank you

Its funny you did it that way, I was going to try that first then the idea of the piping came to me.

I was going to try

Code:

ls -lt>files.txt

Then sort the list somehow using sort( I am fairly new to linux so I was going to work on a way to format the text file exactly the way I wanted it), then I was going to ask how to tell exiftool how to read the names from a file.

so you answered both my asked and unasked questions. Thank you

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2009-12-16 19:07:13-08]

Just for my own interest, I played around a bit with this.
You can generate a list of filenames sorted by any
criteria you want using exiftool | sort | awk.  For instance,
this command will generate a list of file names sorted
by CreateDate for all files in the current directory which
contain a createdate:

exiftool -createdate -filename -T -if '$createdate' . | sort | awk '{print substr($0,index($0,"\t")+1)}'

The awk command just strips the CreateDate from each line leaving
only the FileName.  (There are probably better ways to do this, but
I found one that at least seems to work.)

So you could do what you want in one command like this:

exiftool '-FileName<CreateDate' -d %Y%m%d%-3nc.%%e `exiftool -createdate -filename -T -ext cr2 . | sort | awk '{print substr($0,index($0,"\t")+1)}'`

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by crosschk on 2009-12-16 19:20:27-08]

Thank you again. For your help and one cool app. I'll work on this bad boy when I get home

[Archive]

[Originally posted by crosschk on 2009-12-17 10:01:22-08]

When I tried the one command option, I got an error.  

Warning: Invalid tag name 'FileName<CreateDate'

I probably just have to play with it for the right tag name for my files. But I was able to do

Code:

ls | sort>pix.txt
exiftool -d %m-%d-%Y-%%3nc.%%e "-filename<CreateDate" -@ pix.txt

And that worked exactly as I wanted it to. Thanx again

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2009-12-17 12:25:12-08]

My guess is that the warning is because you are using an ancient version
of exiftool.  The current version is 8.02.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by crosschk on 2009-12-17 14:37:15-08]

Duh!, Thanx