Difficulty renaming files

[James Penner]

I'm working on a Windows machine using Exiftool in a batch file, and I'm experiencing some unexpected issues when trying to rename files.

Here's what I'm doing:
(this is based on a discussion in this thread: https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=5768.0)

I'm using a batch file to rename images by prepending the created date (or if that isn't available, the file modified date) and replacing spaces with hyphens. I'm also adding a letter to the date to specify what kind of date it is (m for modified, c for created).

So an original file name might look like this:
    this is a picture.jpg

And the final result after running the batch would be
   20140430c_this-is-a-picture.jpg

I began with Phil's suggestion:

Code Select Expand

exiftool "-filename<${filemodifydate}_${filename;tr/ /-/}" "-filename<${createdate}_${filename;tr/ /-/}" -d %Y%m%d DIR

Which worked great.

I modified it slightly

Code Select Expand

exiftool.exe -r -IgnoreMinorErrors -overwrite_original "-filename<${filemodifydate}m_${filename;tr/ /-/}" "-filename<${createdate}c_${filename;tr/ /-/}" -d %%Y%%m%%d DIR

But now if it doesn't find the created date, it doesn't return the modified date.

It returns:
c_this-is-a-picture.jpg

instead of
20140430m_this-is-a-picture.jpg

Any insight as to what the problem might be?

Thank you for your time.

[Phil Harvey]

This is due you your addition of the -IgnoreMinorErrors (-m) option:

            If a specified tag does not exist, a minor warning is issued and
            the line with the missing tag is not printed.  However, the -f
            option may be used to set the value of missing tags to '-' (but
            this may be configured via the MissingTagValue API option), or the
            -m option may be used to ignore minor warnings and leave the
            missing values empty.

- Phil

[James Penner]

Perfect, everything's working as expected.

I realize now that what I really wanted was the -q option.

Thanks again!