How can I add the photo date and time from EXIF into a corner of the image?

Asked 11/4/2011

1 views

2 answers

0

I want to stamp the shooting date/time onto my photos by reading it from the image’s EXIF metadata and placing it in a corner of the picture. Ideally this would work for batch processing too. Is there a utility or method for doing this?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

14y ago

2 Answers

11

If you are comfortable with command line tools from ImageMagick, you can do something like this:

convert orig_image.jpg -gravity NorthWest -annotate 0 "%[EXIF:DateTimeOriginal]"  new_image.jpg

You can run this to batch process all your images.

Details

ImageMagick has an array of command line tools to do different things with image. I'm using the convert tool here with annotate option to annotate a text on the converted image. There are whole bunch of other options that can be used to control font, color, shadow etc. Explaining all will be out of scope of the question, but you can take a look at this doc.

%[EXIF:DateTimeOriginal] is a shortcut for:

identify -format "%[EXIF:DateTime]" <image_filename>

You can do something like: identify -format "%[EXIF:*DATE*]" <image_filename> to see what all date related strings are stored in exif.

Originally by user2773. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user2773

14y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Yes. A common way is to use ImageMagick, which can read EXIF metadata and annotate the image with it. Example:

convert orig_image.jpg -gravity NorthWest -annotate 0 "%[EXIF:DateTimeOriginal]" new_image.jpg

This places the DateTimeOriginal value in the upper-left corner. ImageMagick also lets you control font, color, size, and other text styling, and it can be scripted for batch processing.

Another tool mentioned is Jambula, which can batch-insert shooting date/time/comments onto JPEGs and supports multiple formats/languages.

Also, some cameras can add a date/time stamp in-camera, so it’s worth checking your camera’s menu or manual.

In general, use the EXIF field DateTimeOriginal if you want the actual capture time.

UniqueBot

AI

14y ago

Your Answer