About
ExifTool is a tool used to manipulate image metadata
Organizing files
Organize multimedia files by date
Put files in a directory by year with subdirectories for each month:
exiftool '-Directory<DateTimeOriginal' -d %Y/%m /path
Replace /path with path to a file, directory, or a wildcard pattern. Note that it won’t read directories recursively (e.g. contents of subdirectories) so you may need to modify the path, e.g. /directory/*.
If that doesn’t work, it may be because the DateTimeOriginal tag isn’t defined (e.g. for .mp4 files):
-
List other date/time EXIF tags, e.g.
exiftool -s video.mp4 | egrep -i "date|time" -
Run the command using a different tag, e.g.
exiftool '-Directory<CreateDate' -d %Y/%m DCIM/*
Viewing metadata
View all metadata
exiftool -s path/to/file
(-s is optional but it shows the short name of each tag which is useful for other commands)
View one tag
Put a dash (-) in front of the tag name, e.g.
exiftool -s -CreateDate path/to/file
(-s is optional here as well; if left out, then the full tag name will be displayed)
Manipulating image metadata
Remove all metadata from file
exiftool -all= path/to/file
Rotate an image
Rotate an image 90° clockwise by changing the metadata (this does not modify the original image):
exiftool -Orientation="Rotate 90 CW" path/to/file
Set image timestamp based on filename
exiftool '-DateTimeOriginal<filename' /path
Set image timestamp to specific value
exiftool -AllDates="2017-06-30 18:25:07" image.jpg
Set file timestamps based on metadata
exiftool "-FileCreateDate<DateTimeOriginal" "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" file
Fix EXIF metadata
https://exiftool.org/faq.html#Q20
When running exiftool, if you get an unrecoverable error, you can try to fix it by rebuilding the metadata from scratch:
exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile @ -all:all -unsafe -icc_profile bad.jpg
Copy EXIF metadata from one file to another
exiftool -TagsFromFile srcimage.jpg "-all:all>all:all" targetimage.jpg
Adjust file metadata dates by a certain amount
Add 1 year, 12 month, 28 days, 14 hours, 54 minutes, 32 seconds:
exiftool "-AllDates+=1:12:28 14:54:32" *.jpg
You can use WolframAlpha to calculate the amount to adjust, if needed: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2017-07-10+11%3A24%3A00+-+1980-07-05+20%3A24%3A00