Listmates, I've been meaning to pass this snippet along. I believe it was Patrick that pointed me to exiftool some time back. Organizing you mass of digital pictures couldn't be any easier than with exiftool or jhead. Both available for openSuSE and, for your friends that don't use linux, each has a windows counterpart that runs from the command prompt. Many of you already know, but for those that don't, one of the biggest pains about digital cameras is organizing the hundreds or thousands of 103Z2987.jpg files into a meaningful file structure that allows you to find pictures when you need them. A filename like 103Z2987.jpg doesn't tell me anything about that photo except that it came from my wife's camera because I set her camera to create 103Z... files. What I want in a filename is information that tells me when the picture was taken that will sort in chronological order no matter what I am looking at them with. I like a filename of the form YYYY-mm-DD-HHMMSS.jpg. For example: 2009-01-27-165238.jpg That way, just by looking at the filename, I know exactly when that photo was taken. Both exiftool and jhead provide the perfect solution. They will read the exif data and rename the photos with the format you provide. (the format parameters are from strftime). exiftool is a bit more flexible because, not only will it rename for you, but it will move the resulting files to where ever you want them. I had thousands of files in an awkward directory structure partially created from digikam and partially created by copying the photos from the memory stick. With one basic command line, I was able to rename and reorganize everything into a logical structure by year, by months 1-12, and then by date and time in each month. Example: 2003 2004---- 01 02 03------- 2004-03-05-174331.jpg 2004-03-05-174522.jpg 2004-03-07-082311.jpg 04 .. 12 2005 ... 2009 The man page for exiftool is quite good (see the example section at the bottom) I used the following command to reorder everything into the directory structure above using the exif tag 'CreateDate' for the file name: exiftool -r '-FileName<CreateDate' -d \ /home/pictures/family_pictures/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S.%%e \ year2004/*.jpg Basically, the command just says recursively read each .jpg file, get the 'CreateDate' (date picture was taken) and use that as the filename and then place the renamed picture in the /home/pictures/family_pictures/ directory, under the %Y (year) subdirectory it belongs in, then in the %m (month) subdirectory it belongs in, with the filename of %Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S (YYYY-mm-DD-HHMMSS) preserving the original extension (.%%e) The only issue I had was with the (-r) option not wanting to recursively descend into all subdirectories. Changing the filespec to */*.jpg would get me one additional level of subdirectories, so I ended up just issuing the command 8-9 times and changed the filespec information (dir1/*.jpg, dir2/*.jpg, etc.) to go through all my picture directories. (I actually wanted to do the first couple one-at-a-time just in case something went wrong) Of course, the find command or 'for i in $(ls)....' would automate the process. Also, don't forget the -i (ignore) option if you have directories you don't want reorganized. I had ../scaled directories in each of my photo directories where I had scaled images to 800x600 for the digital picture frame that I needed to ignore. Absolutely Amazing. I re-ordered just over 8,000 photos in a little less that 30 minutes. (that included reading the man page and messing around with the filespec) If you can get all the files in one command, I bet the 8,000 photos would have been done in less than 3 minutes total. I did a little more thorough write up that is available at: http://www.3111skyline.com/linux/photo-mgmt.php The page is done for exiftool and jhead, but I still have the gallery2 information to add. Just thought I would pass this along for the benefit of those that haven't found exiftool and jhead yet. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. Rankin Law Firm, PLLC 510 Ochiltree Street Nacogdoches, Texas 75961 Telephone: (936) 715-9333 Facsimile: (936) 715-9339 www.rankinlawfirm.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org