Rename based on EXIF date

Hi all,

I'm trying to create a rule to rename pictures. My naming convention is YYYYMMDD_location_counter.ext, where:

YYYYMMDD

Location

counter

My target workflow is:

To_be_Processed/location

To_be_Processed

YYYY

Location

YYYYMMDD_location

YYYY

location

YYYYMMDD_location

I imagine this may sound a little cumbersome, but this naming convention is the result of several years of progressive approximation and it serves a number of specific scopes. I used to manage this structure directly from Aperture, but I have decided to migrate to Lightroom which has not an equally flexible folder structure management feature, so I need to rearrange my workflow differently.

Any idea if this is possible in Hazel?

Thanks a lot for any help.

e.

Please do not post questions in the Tips forum. The sticky up top there says not to do this.

It should be doable except for the EXIF part. Hazel uses Spotlight to get at metadata and unfortunately, OS X's Spotlight importer seems to ignore the date taken from EXIF (though it will extract other bits, for some reason). You'll probably have to find a commandline tool to extract that date and use a script with Hazel.

parole.sprekate wrote:Hi all,

I'm trying to create a rule to rename pictures. My naming convention is YYYYMMDD_location_counter.ext, where:

- YYYYMMDD is the date I took the picture, based on EXIF information
- Location is where I took this picture. This information, in particulare, should be inherited from the folder name the picture is in. More on this later.
- counter is a 4 digit counter that should restart from 0 every time the rule is applied

Any idea if this is possible in Hazel?

Thanks a lot for any help.

e.

Attaching a series of 4 rules that I think accomplishes what you want, but you need to install Exiftool to properly read the EXIF info. You can download and install from here: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

Then download the following zip file, extract the rules and add them to your To_Be_Processed folder in Hazel.

The only change you would need to make is in the final rule, Sort_into_Proper_Folders, the first embedded shell script runs an exiftool command and you need to set the path location to the top level Master folder (i.e. /username/photos/Master/). The sorting and sub sorting should then happen automatically.

The way the counter works is that if you drop a bunch of files in a Location folder, it will start numbering them 0001, 0002, etc. Once the contents of the Location folder are COMPLETELY emptied, the Reset_Folder_Counter rule runs to reset the counter for the next crop of files. FYI, until the counter token is run for the first time on a processed file, hazel will report a shell script error because its trying to reset an empty Location folder which has never received the counter attribute.

Let us know how it works for you.

Very nice! Thanks for making this available.

Can you explain how the Sort_into_Proper_Folders action works? In particular, it looks like you are first calling the EXIFTool binary via shell script (exiftool '-Directory<CreateDate' -d /PATH/TO/MASTER/FOLDER/%Y "$1") but then also asking Hazel to do a "Sort into subfolder" operation. Doesn't the former handle the folder sorting for you?

Ramon

it certainly could but he is sorting into a special subfolder with date_location pattern. I thought it would be easier sort w this custom name pattern using Hazel then Exif tool. But if you wanted to sort w just EXIF you could do that by changing the format of %Y to something like %Y%m%

Im using the rule you gave as a downloadable example, but Id like to tweak the naming convention a bit. Im a novice at scripting, so any help would be appreciated...

Currently, the rule is...

IF KIND IS IMAGE

1) RUN SHELL SCRIPT [embedded]

SHELL /bin/bash

Code: Select all: exiftool -P -d '%Y%m%d' \ '-filename<${FileModifyDate;}.%e' \ '-filename<${GPSDateTime;}.%e' \ '-filename<${MediaCreateDate;}.%e' \ '-filename<${ModifyDate;}.%e' \ '-filename<${DateTimeOriginal;}.%e' \ "$1"

2) RENAME with pattern : [name] [extension]

This outputs a file with this pattern...

20140508.jpg
YYYYMMDD.jpg

I'd like to output as follows....

2010-10-04 at 21-41-41.jpg
YYYY-MM-DD at HH-MM-SS[.ext]

Any help would be appreciated!