When I was home over the weekend, I was working on helping my parents sort out the photos they took while they were in Europe. Doing this, I noticed that the date on the camera was out by a month. Being a stickler for correct metadata, I tried to figure out a way to fix this. This is the command line that I came up with. I’ve broken it into multiple lines here for clarity.
for f in *.jpg ; do
NEWDATE=`exiftool -CreateDate $f |
perl -pe 's/.*: 2006:([^:]+):/sprintf "2006:%02d:", ($1+1)/e'`;
echo $f: $NEWDATE;
exiftool -CreateDate="$NEWDATE" -DateTimeOriginal="$NEWDATE" $f;
done
This will modify the month field in the EXIF data of each file by increasing it by 1. It doesn’t handle wrap around or anything, I didn’t need to do that. The fanciest it gets is making sure there’s the correct number of zeros padding the number.
You don’t want to run this twice.
The tool ‘jhead’ (also used by Gallery) is your friend here.
You could have gone:
$ jhead -ta+744 *.jpg
Basically, that example adds 744 hours (31 days) to the date. Also have a look at the man page for the ‘-da’ option.
‘jhead’ is great.
Ah, cunning. I didn’t know about jhead.