[KimDaBa] Scraping new EXIF dates on "old" images

[jedd]

On Thu February 26 2004 04:27 pm, Jody Harris wrote:
 ] Is there a way to ask 1.1 to rescan all images to extract the EXIF date 
 ] and replace the existing date in the database?

 This is the main reason it took me about 4 weeks of experimenting
 before I started 'the one xml file' that I'll keep forever.  The delay
 was as I went through and wrote scripts & changed dates on every
 image file I had.

 The scripts are pretty custom for my purposes, but might be of use
 if anyone's interested.

 The two big things were setting the file's time to match any EXIF data
 within the image.  This was mostly against photos I'd taken, and so I
 trusted the EXIF date data (though there's date-taken, date-digi, date-created
 records available in the EXIF standard).  For digital photos from people
 who are less anal about the time being right in their camera .. it involves
 some manual checking back to known events & times.  Time consuming,
 to be sure.

 The second thing was setting up timestamp.txt files in each directory of
 scanned photos (most of my scans are APS so I can get the date & time,
 as printed on the back of each photo).  This is particularly time-consuming
 to set up, but once I've got a '0-timestamp.txt' file in a directory, the script
 does the rest.  It inserts EXIF time-date entries, and touch's the file.

 This isn't much use to you right now, after you've started your database,
 but I mention it for two reasons.  (There's two of everything.)  Firstly, you
 may want to fix up all your dates & times properly against  the files, on
 the off-chance that you might benefit from this later.  I anticipate using
 kimdaba forever now, a decision I feel is pretty safe since Jesper's going
 to do the same thing.  But you may be afraid of that kind of long-term
 commitment. ;)    Anyway, time-consuming though it is, it's probably
 a worthwhile investment of your time.

 Secondly, the tools I used may be retro-useable by you, if you've got some
 scripting ability (I wrote mine in bash, but obviously any language could
 do this).  Using the 'exiftools'  (URI: http://www.hugsan.com/EXIFutils/  )
 you should be able to script something to rip out the right time from the image
 files, change the time-stamp of the file, and the entries in kimdaba's index.xml

 This would be tricky, but not hugely difficult.  Jesper could then offer that
 script on his web page, as I'm sure other people hit this problem periodically.

 FYI  exifedit can insert new entries into files that don't contain any EXIF
 data at all.  I'm inserting date/time, artist, make, model, image width & height
 for scans of my old film-camera.  "exiffile -t" will touch a file's timestamp
 to match whatever the EXIF date is set to, which is what I run over newly
 acquired images before running up kimdaba, so that there's zero confusion
 about the time as far as kimdaba is concerned.

 Jedd.