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Participant
October 26, 2024
Question

Help with Date Metadata in Photos. How to Automate the Process?

  • October 26, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 197 views

Hi everyone! I'm facing a challenge with managing date metadata in my photos, and I would really appreciate your help.

 

Context: I started by looking into whether Google Photos could automatically change the capture date in the metadata so I could download the photos and maintain the order in other galleries, like Samsung's. Unfortunately, I found that it can't do this automatically; it only allows me to manually adjust the "creation date" on their platform, not the IPTC or XMP metadata fields where the "capture date" is stored in the photo file.

 

Now, I’m looking for a way to automate this process. Ideally, I want software that can read the date from the file name and place it in the "capture date" metadata field of each image. Does anyone have experience or advice on how to achieve this? Maybe there’s a tool or script that makes it easy. I'm asking here because perhaps Adobe has already provided a tool for this in their suite, or even Premiere might be able to help.

 

One of the challenges is that there are different date formats in the file names. For example, some images have the date in the format xx-xx-xx, others just as xxxxxx, and some have screenshot text before the date.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

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1 reply

johnrellis
Legend
October 28, 2024

I think you'll have to do some non-trivial scripting yourself.  

 

If you're skilled at writing shell scripts, you could write a script that recognizes the different file name patterns and then invokes the free Exiftool utility to set the field EXIF:DateTimeOriginal to the extracted date.

 

You could do something similar with the LR plugin Run Any Command. It will let you write small bits of Lua code that extract the dates from the file name, to be used as command line arguments to the Exiftool program.  I'd only recommend this if you're an experienced programmer.