Data from filename or filesystem for image metadata

Retrobatch
1

Does Retrobatch allow pulling something like date information from the filename or filesystem metadata, to use as data that can be inserted into the image’s EXIF metadata?

Example: I have a lot of older JPEG photos that have (almost) nothing in the way of EXIF metadata. The filenames, however, contain YYYY-MM-DD data. I’d like to extract that from the name and insert it into the EXIF as image date — preferably without any recompression. In some of these files, the filesystem creation/modification date(s) may also be useful if they can be extracted for re-use.

2

This is something that could be done with a JavaScript plugin.

The trick is going to be pulling out the date from file name. Do the file names start with the date, or is it kind of fuzzy?

3

The filename is basically the date, plus an incrementing number. So …

1999-04-15-001.jpg
1999-04-15-002.jpg
1999-04-15-003.jpg

… and so on.

If this requires JavaScript (or any scripting), it seems like that’s a Pro-only feature.

4

Yea, the plugins are for Pro only.

I’ve put together a quick example here: Retrobatch JavaScript Nodes

“Fuzzy Date Set” is the name. It’ll parse the dates out in the format “YYYY-MM-DD extra stuff here”. If you want to adopt it for your case with the incrementing numbers, that’ll require a little bit of modification (maybe add a split based on the character ‘-’).

5

Found a nice bit of javascript to find the ISO date within a string without requiring it to be separated by a space.

Works with:
2014-09-04-09.53.25.jpg
IMG00124-20110111-1650.jpg

6

Looks cool, and maybe I can adopt it when I get a chance, but I’m pretty sure that’s not JavaScript and might possibly be powershell script.

7

How silly of me! You’re right, of course.

How about some actual javascript. Replace lines 15 and 16 in your MainScript.js with the following:

// Assumes dates are year 1500 thru 2400
// Matches first date found in the form of 2014-09-04 or 20140904; leading zeros required.
const ISODateRegex = /(?:1[5-9]|2[0-4])\d{2}-?[01]\d-?[0-3]\d/;
var theDate = theFileName.match(ISODateRegex);

That should do it!

8

Not quite- it’s failing in my testing (never played with JS regex), but I’ll take a stab at figuring out why later on.