default value if json file is missing

[antong77]

What a freaking mess google takeout is.
What an amazing tool exiftool is. Thank you for the tool.

so, I downloaded my pics from google photos, and have jpg files without json, json files without jpgs, names changed for no apparent reason, etc. A big mess. The exiftool takes care of lots of the files when the name match up, but lots of times, the names don't match for jpg & json files.

So my thought is: if I run the exiftool command on a directory, and the json file is not found for a particular file, use the date from the previously processed file as the value on the current file (or. a preset default would be OK too). The date might be wrong, but is likely to be closer to the actual date than the google date.

I tried playing with some params in exiftool, but I am too much of a newbie, and tried some unix scripting to generate missing json files, but cant automate it enough.

I am on macos v12.6.2 and exiftool v12.63
The command I am using now is:
exiftool -v0 -d %s -tagsfromfile '%d/%F.json' '-FileModifyDate<PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp' MyDir1

It works great when the json name matches the jpg file, but with the mess google made of the names, there are many failures.

Any suggestions welcome. Thanks very much.

[ericconn]

I know nothing about JSON, but have you tried reading all the possible date attributes in the file so find out which one is correct? I doubt Google overwrote all of them. Here are the ones I know of off the top of my head. If you do a CSV output with -a to see all tags, you can see them that way, along with everything else, including possibly the original filename.

Some date attributes:

-DateCreated
-DateTimeOriginal
-DateTimeOriginalSubSec
-DateDigitized
-DateDigitizedSubSec
-CreateDate

[antong77]

Thanks for the reply.

All of the fields in the jpg file related to date were changed.
   FileModifyDate                  : 2023:06:19 13:20:22-04:00
   FileAccessDate                  : 2023:06:22 10:03:32-04:00
   FileInodeChangeDate             : 2023:06:20 12:58:03-04:00

All of the date fields in the matching json file were changed as well, but there is a timestamp in the json file which I can convert to a real date/time. There are no timestamp files in the jpg.
   CreationTimeTimestamp           : 1438973764
   PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp         : 1438973764
Which for me is Friday, August 7, 2015 2:56:04 PM
I use this tag to apply to the jpg, no problem.

My problem is when the data does not exist.
Is there a way to issue the exiftool command with a default date to use if no date is found in
 -tagsfromfile

[antong77]

I looked at the problem from a new direction and found a solution that works for me.
Rather than using exiftool to process an entire directory, I use it to process a single file at a time.
Capturing the date from the previous file and passing to the next is no problem.
thanks

[StarGeek]

My standard warning regarding Google Photos/Takeout.  Google has not removed any data from your files.  The only thing that was lost are the file system based data, such as FileCreateDate/FileModifyDate, MDItem*/XAtt* data on a Mac, and Alternate Data Streams (rare) on Windows.  These will always be lost because the files are no longer on your local disk. And, of course, files such as screenshots or downloaded from social media never had embedded data to begin with.

Unless you made edits and added information on the Google Photos site, you do need not to copy data from the json files.

If you try copying data from the Takeout json files, you will be overwriting the original data.  If you need the file system time stamps, you should copy them from the time stamps embedded in the file, such as the EXIF:DateTimeOriginal.