On Thu, 2011-11-10 at 10:22 -0800, David Vincent-Jones wrote: > The problem that I faced with Shotwell is that some older image editors > ignored the camera_date and applied only a processing_date to their > output. > > I keep my images in a dated folder (both the raw and final), Shotwell > however can and does move my material into weird and mysterious places. > If I had need to reprocess a file months or years later it may be > totally misplaced (lost). > > I could overcome this if there were a way to 're-date' images in bulk. > My only other alternative would be to only use Shotwell for relatively > recent material and use another system entirely for early work. Bit of a > nuisance! > > What solution would a Shotwell user find for instance with a large > collection of scanned film material? > > David
I faced this problem some months ago, with a collection of images I had scanned some years ago from film exposed as far back as the 1960s. I had organised these images in directories labelled 1964-01, 1964-02... 1964-nn etc, to indicate the first, second ... 'nn'th film developed during each year, and labelled the images themselves according to the number on the film itself - IMG001.jpg, IMG002.jpg etc. There were, of course, some anomalies - missing images, image numbers going up two at a time, and images which I had scanned again at a higher resolution (e.g. "IMG023 2900.jpg"), when inspection of a quick lo-res scan of a film had revealed an image I wanted to work on. A completely automated solution appeared out of reach, so after a spell of issuing a single command for each image I evolved a method using a shell script for each directory which set a unique value of DateTimeOriginal for each image as follows exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:00" IMG000.jpg exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:01" "Contact Sheet.jpg" exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:01" IMG001.jpg exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:02" IMG002.jpg exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:03" IMG003.jpg exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:04" IMG004.jpg exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:05" IMG005.jpg exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:05" "IMG005 2900.jpg" exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:06" IMG006.jpg exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:06" "IMG006 2900.jpg" exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:07" IMG007.jpg exiftool -DateTimeOriginal="1970:01:01 12:00:07" "IMG007 rescanned.jpg" ... rm *original This is for the folder 1970-01, to which I arbitrarily assigned a date of 1st Jan 1970, and set the time for negative #1 at 12:00:01. This gave me scope for the occasional negative numbered less than 0. Once I was sure of what I was doing, I switched off the protection of a backup copy of the original file by appending "rm *original" to the script. There are no doubt many better ways of doing this, and of automating the process, but sometimes it's best just to bash on through the job without thinking too much about it! Once imported into Shotwell, each film is regarded as single event, with individual images displayed in chronological order within the event. Michael _______________________________________________ Shotwell mailing list [email protected] http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
