Re: [Shotwell] Importing old photos that don't have EXIF



On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 01:56:20PM +0100, Adam Funk wrote:
I recently set up a new computer & started using Shotwell instead of
my mix of homebrewed photo management techniques.  I started with
an empty ~/Pictures directory and ~/Pictures.OLD copies from the old
machine's ~/Pictures.  Some of the older photos were taken with a film
camera but scanned in when I had the film developed, so they don't
have the EXIF metadata you get from a digital camera, but I've already
classified them by year and month, for example:

$ jhead ~/Pictures.OLD/2001/2001-08-France/200108-a00.jpg
File name    : /home/adam/Pictures.OLD/2001/2001-08-France/200108-a00.jpg
File size    : 848303 bytes
File date    : 2007:08:08 19:53:54
Resolution   : 2076 x 1484
JPEG Quality : 86
Comment      : LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01?

But Shotwell falls back to the file timestamp and puts the file here:

Pictures/2007/08/08/200108-a00.jpg

Is there any way to manually override this?  At a push, I could
probably write a script to scan for photos without an exif "Date/Time"
entry & make an approximate one up, then import them, but I wonder if
there is a better way.

Hi Adam,

I am not aware of support for this in Shotwell. However, I managed to
work around this when I scanned my old photos by adding the necessary
EXIF tag to my photos before I imported them into Shotwell. In a
nutshell, I would have a script run this command on each of my photos.

exiv2 -M"set Exif.Image.DateTime Ascii YYYY:MM:dd 00:00:00" \
        <filename>

I attached my crude script that outputs the exiv2 commands. Basically,
you'll need to put the date at the beginning of the filename like so:

2001-XXX.jpg
200108-XXX.jpg
20010829-XXX.jpg

You can have the script run against a directory with this snippet:

ls /path/to/scans | xargs -ifile set-file-datetime.pl file | sh -v

Again, be sure to do this before importing the photos into Shotwell.

Brian

Attachment: set-file-datetime.pl
Description: Text Data



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