Rename thousands of pictures using their EXIF date

Question

I know that every picture should contain some sort of information = EXIF, what interests me is datetime, as I have now 20 000 pictures on disk unsorted, recovered from lost partition.

Example of healthy photo internal information:

I wish there was a way to sort those photos by timestamp, is there? If so, what software could I use?

EDIT:

The timestamp should be extracted from the EXIF information.

New file naming should look similar to the following example:

2017-08-17_15.10.jpg

So far I use integrated Windows 10 tools to image view, edit and so on. No third-party application.

I am looking for an application of such capability.

EDIT2:

• The lost partition was of type NTFS, MBR, so no backup table.

• The drive is a SATA HDD.

EDIT3:

I have already recovered all the data, but the question is different: How to name the files by EXIF information.

EDIT4:

Despite I work on both Windows and Linux, I wish this work to be done on Windows, filesystem on the drive was NTFS.

Answer 1

You can use exiv2. Hans-Henry Jakobsen has written a very neat tutorial about it. Here's a quote:

Linux

exiv2 -r'%Y%m%d-%H%M_:basename:' rename $(ls)

Windows (from the command prompt)

exiv2.exe -r %Y%m%d-%H%M_:basename: rename d*

Windows (in a MS-DOS batch file)

exiv2.exe -r %%Y%%m%%d-%%H%%M_:basename: rename d*

The markers you need to use are %Y, %m and %d. You can add hyphens or dots in between them as you wish.

Answer 2

You could use Bulk Rename Utility. It is a freeware, GUI tool for Windows. It can rename files in a variety of ways.

To rename based on the EXIF date/time, look at the option for Auto Date (8). If you set this to Taken (Original) it will use the EXIF tags. You can specify how the date/time should be formatted, and what separators between segments.

Answer 3

While I'm on Linux and have my solutions scripted, I just checked and the main components are available for Windows, too: Exiftool and JHead. This is a command-line utility, so you need to run it from your cmd prompt. Useful commands include:

jhead -ft <image> # set the file's time stamp from Exif data
jhead -n<format_string> <image> # rename the file according to the format

The latter you can run on the entire directory:

jhead -n%Y-%m%d_%H.%M *.jpg # 2017-08-17_15.10.jpg

Those are the command you will need according to your question, but the mentioned tools can do a lot more – e.g. rotating the images, adding comments, and the like. I use them a lot for batch processing of my photos.

Answer 4

I found one possible application that could do it:

AmoK Exif Sorter

After installation of 64-bit version, there's bad link to Java in the created shortcut, you need to change it, for instance in my case the correct path is:

"C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.8.0_144\bin\javaw.exe" -Xmx256m -jar "C:\Program Files\AmoK Exif Sorter\exifsorter.jar"

It works just fine for my case.