I have these recovered photo’s from my old website and saved them from Photoshop > save for the web, so no EXIF data is present.
I can’t use finders creation dates either.
My photos are in folder with the date names like so:
2004-05-25
DSCN1379.jpg
DSCN1383.jpg
DSCN1395.jpg
2004-05-26
DSCN1402.jpg
DSCN1405.jpg
…
So now I would like to take the the date from the folder name and write that into the EXIF as ‘Date Time Original’
Can anyone enlighten me with something?
I am not sure if this can be done with automator and I think I need to use EXIFTool to write the data, but I am not sure and have only very basic experience with automator, no applescript.
Thanks for any help!
Model: MacBook Pro
Browser: Firefox 2.0.0.12
Operating System: Mac OS X (10.5)
I have not ever used ExifTool, but that would most likely be your best bet if you want the actual metadata for each file altered (which is what it sounds like you want). iPhoto can change the date of an image (and that portion is scriptable), but it does not affect the metadata for each image, rather its date as seen in the iPhoto viewer.
A quick read of the ExifTool site shows it to be a command line tool, and although Automator has that ability, your big issue is using the folder name to extract the date, and then use that date as the original date for each image. The variable abilities of Automator are pretty good, but I am not sure they are this good, whereas AppleScript has excellent date/time functions built in. For instance, one can easily get a date property from your folder names thusly (The folder name is 2005-5-21):
set a to (info for (choose folder))'s name
set img_date to date ((a's word 2) & "-" & (a's word 3) & "-" & (a's word 1) as text)
-->date "Saturday, May 21, 2005 12:00:00 AM"
Once that is done, all you need is a tool to use that date in something like ExifTool, which I personally am not experienced enough to comment on.
You might try posting a digest of this thread (and reference it as well) in the OS X Forum and see what pops up. I have a bit too much happening this week, otherwise I would love to take a crack at ExifTool and see what it can do.
Thanks Craig, your script example is already a good start.
I had the impression already that I would be better of with Applescript, that’s why I found this forum 
ExifTool sure get’s the job done, but it intimidates me a bit.
I will look into SetEXIFData
http://82.94.219.20/~marcvos/software/realbasic/sed.html
which works on EXIFTool
Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll ask in the OSX Forum later.