How to increment file creation date from file to file

[StarGeek]

There should be a space after the quote and before the slash that is the start of the file path.

[Stephen Marsh]

EDIT: Ah, I did not see StarGeeks reply!

exiftool '-datetimeoriginal+<0:$filesequence'/Users/Andy/Desktop/wedding/1

Add a space before the directory path:

exiftool '-datetimeoriginal+<0:$filesequence' /Users/Andy/Desktop/wedding/1

If this is on a Mac and you did not drag the folder into Terminal.app you may also wish to enclose the directory path in single quotes too. This is not necessary in this case as there are no word spaces in the path, it is just good habit for paths that do not contain escaped word spaces:

'/Users/Andy/Desktop/wedding/1'

P.S. I am presuming that "1" is a folder?

[StarGeek]

EDIT: Ah, I did not see StarGeeks reply!

But you had a more complete answer than my lazy one

[halfasia]

Yeah adding the space fixed it. Thanks!

[heatvent]

Hi, I modified the above code for a similar use.  I have scanned slide jpg files sorted as follows P:\Processed\YEAR\Subject.  I use the following batch file to change the date taken the 1/1/YEAR 11:01 am and then increment each file by 1 minute.  This is mostly to get the files to show in the correct year for photo apps and to keep in sequence.  I have no idea of the actual date taken:)

Command to use (1963 as an example year):

ExifToolReDate.bat 1963

ExifToolReDate.bat Batch file code....

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echo off

set YEAR=%1

echo Working on all files in P:\Processed\%YEAR%

echo Changing year for all dates in files...

exiftool -all= -AllDates="%YEAR%:01:01 11:01:00" -recurse -quiet -overwrite_original P:\Processed\%YEAR%

echo Incrementing all times by 1 minute...

exiftool "-AllDates+<0:${filesequence}" -recurse -quiet -overwrite_original P:\Processed\%YEAR%

echo Process completed!


[suplemereader]

Hello. exiftool is amazingly feature-rich, but i'm lost. Resurrecting the thread but looking for guidance.

I want to increment SubSecTimeOriginal to get a trailing digit on timestamps, as in DateTimeOriginal shown below.

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$ exiftool -Time:All /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00001.jpg
File Modification Date/Time     : 2019:01:20 03:00:51-05:00
File Access Date/Time           : 2019:01:20 03:13:57-05:00
File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2019:01:20 03:00:51-05:00
Modify Date                     : 2000:09:13 20:20:03
Date/Time Original              : 2014:02:21 10:48:00
Create Date                     : 2000:09:13 11:40:49
Sub Sec Time Original           : 0
Date Created                    : 2000:09:13
Time Created                    : 11:40:49-05:00
Date/Time Created               : 2000:09:13 11:40:49-05:00
Date/Time Original              : 2014:02:21 10:48:00.0

I'm able to set an initial SubSecTimeOriginal value for every file in the directory...

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$ exiftool -subsectimeoriginal="0" /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/ -overwrite_original_in_place
1 directories scanned
10 image files updated

and a test run of the incrementing appears successful...

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$ exiftool -p '0:$filesequence $filename' /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/
0:0 img___00001.jpg
0:1 img___00002.jpg
0:2 img___00003.jpg
0:3 img___00007.jpg
0:4 img___00006.jpg
0:5 img___00004.jpg
0:6 img___00010.jpg
0:7 img___00005.jpg
0:8 img___00008.jpg
0:9 img___00009.jpg

But I cannot get the final piece of it to run successfully... 

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$ exiftool '-subsectimeoriginal+<0:$filesequence' /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/ -overwrite_original_in_place
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00001.jpg
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00002.jpg
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00003.jpg
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00007.jpg
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00006.jpg
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00004.jpg
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00010.jpg
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00005.jpg
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00008.jpg
Warning: No writable tags set from /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/img___00009.jpg
    1 directories scanned
    0 image files updated
   10 image files unchanged


Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Phil Harvey]

SubSecTimeOriginal is a single number, not a date/time value. So shifting is done like this:

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$ exiftool '-subsectimeoriginal+<filesequence' /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/ -overwrite_original_in_place

But if you want to start from zero, and don't care about the existing values, the "+" isn't necessary:

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$ exiftool '-subsectimeoriginal<filesequence' /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test/ -overwrite_original_in_place

- Phil

[suplemereader]

Thank you Phil, helped a lot!

Is there a way with exiftool to have filesequence generate x number of digits and leading zeros?

For example, if I wanted a 3-digit filesequence result...
iterations 0-9
000, 001, --> 009

iterations 10-99
010, 011,  --> 099

iterations 100-999
100, 101,  --> 999

[StarGeek]

See this this previous post for three examples.  Just change FileIndex to FileSequence and change the 5 to 3.

[suplemereader]

Hi Stargeek,

Thank you for the pointer to that posting, but I am still missing something.

After setting the SubSecTime manually on my test files, I tried some of those solutions with the following results:

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exiftool -P '-subsectimeoriginal<${filesequence;$_=substr('000'.$_,-3)}' '-subsectimedigitized<${filesequence;$_=substr('000'.$_,-3)}' /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test_2 -overwrite_original_in_place

$ exiftool -subsectime -subsectimeoriginal -subsectimedigitized /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test_2
======== /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test_2/001.jpg
Sub Sec Time                    : 1
Sub Sec Time Original           : 00
Sub Sec Time Digitized          : 00
======== /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test_2/011.jpg
Sub Sec Time                    : 11
Sub Sec Time Original           : 01
Sub Sec Time Digitized          : 01
======== /Users/jrb8/Desktop/sortphotos_test_2/111.jpg
Sub Sec Time                    : 111
Sub Sec Time Original           : 02
Sub Sec Time Digitized          : 02


I was hoping to get a 3-digit value for both SubSecTimeOriginal and SubSecTimeDigitized. Anything jump out to you as a mistake in my syntax?

[StarGeek]

Since you appear to be on Mac/Linux, you probably need double quotes around the 0s.  Otherwise, it looks like bash gets in the way and simplifies string 000 to numeric 0.  Just a guess though.

[Phil Harvey]

Yup.  The quoting is the problem.  It isn't bash, but Perl that is doing it.  Without the quotes around "000", it is interpreted as a number.

- Phil

[suplemereader]

Gentlemen,

Thank you both kindly. It's working like a charm now.

[ceej]

Newbie here; very rusty programmer; have also read similar topic in StackExchange but cant find it now. Some of what I include here is from there.  Anyway -

I have a directory of several thousand scanned photographs.
Each has a metadata value of DateCreated/DateTimeOriginal = yyyy/mm/dd-00:00:00 (however it is actually encoded) that was written with each scan.  Large 'bunches' of photographs have the same value.
The date is important - it is 'pretty accurate' and I'd like to keep it.
But the time values for all of the files is 00:00:00

What I would like to do is set the time value to successive 10-second increments.  (this is primarily to insure that various photo apps/services will display the photos in the scanned sequence)
Since there are 24*360=8640 10-second increments in a day, I do not have enough photos of the same day that there would be a conflict.

And I do not need to reset the time value whenever I start a new date (though that would be an added bonus).

So will the (pseudo) code below work?

@echo off
setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion (copied from an example; not clear i need it)
n=0
for %%f in (*.jpg) do (
    echo %%f
   n=n+10
    rem Assign time increment
    exiftool -DateTimeOriginal+="00:00:n" %%f  (not sure if time format is correct)
)

Big question, I guess is: as n grows, will the "00:00:n" take on the proper form?  That is:
n=50   "00:00:n" = 00:00:50
n=60   "00:00:n" = 00:01:00
n=120   "00:00:n" = 00:02:00
n=600   "00:00:n" = 00:10:00
n=3599   "00:00:n" = 00:59:59
n=3600   "00:00:n" = 01:00:00
n=3601   "00:00:n" = 01:00:01
n=8639   "00:00:n" = 23:59:59
n=8640   "00:00:n" = 00:00:00 and will it bump the day number?

If I wanted 1-minute increments, would I use n+n+1 and "00:n:00" ?
Thanks,
  -ceej

[StarGeek]

Newbie here; very rusty programmer; have also read similar topic in StackExchange but cant find it now. Some of what I include here is from there.

Here's the post you're looking for.  It's based upon the second post in this thread.

So will the (pseudo) code below work?

Running exiftool in a loop is always a bad idea, as its biggest performance hit is the startup time.  Running it over several thousand images could take hours this way when letting exiftool do the work itself would take a fraction of that time.  See Common Mistake #3

The command you want to run would be the one listed on the StackExchange post, but changing the single quotes to double quotes since you appear to be on Windows (but use single quotes in PowerShell, I believe)
exiftool "-datetimeoriginal+<0:0:${filesequence}0" DIR

Big question, I guess is: as n grows, will the "00:00:n" take on the proper form?

Yes.  Using the format 0:0:n will increment the the timestamp by the number of seconds, no matter if the number is 1 or 31.6 million (about a year)  .  In the above example, it uses the FileSequence tag, which is a counter incremented for each source file (see Extra tags).

If I wanted 1-minute increments, would I use n+n+1 and "00:n:00" ?

You would use
"-datetimeoriginal+<0:${filesequence}:0"
in the above command.

For further details on shifting times with exiftool, see ExifTool Date/Time Shift Module.