Command Line Basics: View Image EXIF Data

I've got a huge number of digital photos on my computer that need to be organized. What I would like to do is sort the pictures by the date they were taken. The first step to sorting the pictures is to know the date they were taken. As long as the clock is properly set on your camera, your pictures should have the correct date and time of the photo stored in the image's EXIF data. You can view an image's EXIF data using the identify command.

The identify command is part of the Image Magick package. If it's not installed on your system, check your distro's repositories. In Ubuntu you can install it with:

Now that Image Magick is installed, you can view the EXIF data for your images.

Now in my case I'm just interested in the date and time the picture was taken. I can view that information with this command.

The output looks like this.

This means that the picture was taken at 6:48:05 PM on April 4, 2009.

Now that I can view the date, it should be possible to write a script to sort the images into folders by year and month.

Comments

• Recent Posts

  • Fixing Common Problems with LAMP on Ubuntu
  • Installing LAMP on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin
  • Ubuntu 12.04 is Here: List of download mirrors
  • View Images With The Proper EXIF Orientation In Chrome or Chromium
  • Canonical and Microsoft To Join Forces on New UI

• Tags

  android Apache Apple audio avast bash Chromium command line dell fedora firefox flac FreeDOS gadgets gnome google google chrome GStreamer HowTo HP humor ImageMagick jaunty karmic koala LAMP linux Lucid Lynx mp3 MSI Wind Nautilus netbook network news ogg open source opinion phpMyAdmin review security Ubuntu usb web development windows wireless internet WordPress
•