When did I take that picture? Mark your printed Photos
Written by JeffAlexander on January 5, 2009 – 11:15 am -
Ever wonder when you took that digital picture you had printed?
I haven’t printed any digital photos through my local photo lab in quite a while and my wife recently asked me to get some of our Christmas pictures printed. I pulled out the last batch I had printed and noticed that the file names were printed on the back of my prints by the photo lab. That gave me a good reference point on what I had printed last time and gave me a great idea. If I renamed the pictures to contain the date and time they were taken when I had the next batch printed, I would be able to flip it over and see the date and time I took that picture.
When most digital cameras take a picture it will store the camera model, date/time taken, as well as lots of other stuff in the picture itself in what is called the EXIF data. Now I needed to find a program to read that information.
So I pulled out my favorite file renaming application, ReNamer (http://den4b.com), to see if it happend to know about EXIF and lucky me, it did. So I set up it up with a rule to rename my photo’s. The steps I used are available after the jump.
- Drag the photo’s to the ‘Drag your files here’ section of ReNamer
- Click on ‘Add’ to add a rule, Highlight ‘Insert’, and click ‘Insert Meta Tag’
- Choose ‘EXIF_Date’ and click the ‘Insert’ button. I like to put an underscore (_) after the date. So mine looks like ‘:EXIF_Date:_’. Click the ‘Add Rule’ to add the rule.
- You can now click preview to see what the renamed file will looklike. So far your files will be renamed to look like this 2009-01-04 17.23.19_IMG_0214.jpg I like to remove both the periods (.) in the time and the space between the date and time. So I added 1 more rule.
- Click the ‘Add’ to add the next rule. Highlight ‘Replace’
- Type a space for the find and then click the plus (+) button. Then add a period (.) after the *|* so it looks like ‘ *|*.’
- Then add an underscore ‘_’ before and after the *|* for the replace so that it looks like ‘_*|*_’. I also selected ‘all occurrences’ and skip extension. Then click the ‘Add Rule’. This will remove the space between the date and time and replace the periods with an underscore.
- Now click the ‘Preview’ button to check out the file names after the rename. If all looks good your ready to Rename.
- If you plan to use the rules again you can choose the ‘Preset’ menu and ‘Save As’ to save the preset to use next time.
Now this is only useful if your photo lab prints the filename on the back. I have used several different places over the years to print my photos and looking back through them they all appear to have the filename on the back so either I’m lucky or this is common practice. Add a comment if your lab doesn’t do this.
Now the next time you are looking at your printed photo’s and wonder when you took it you can just flip it over and see the date and time of the picture.
Posted in General |
By Joe on Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
URL is missing the “m” in “.com”
Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
January 6th, 2009 at 7:27 am
The URLs look complete to me. Both of them seem to be pointing to http://den4b.com/
Are these the links you are talking about Joe?
Karl L. Gechlik | AskTheAdmin.com Reply:
January 6th, 2009 at 7:46 am
NM - Jeff fixed them. You have to give props for the fast fix :) Thanks Joe and Jeff!
By Joe on Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
Yeah, he’s all over it. Many kudos to Jeff.