How can I find all photos taken in a specific month across many folders?
Asked 4/9/2012
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I have a large photo archive spread across many nested folders, and I want to find every image taken in a given month, such as April, regardless of which folder it is in. File-system dates in Windows may not be reliable because files were sometimes copied to the computer later than they were shot. Is there a good way to search by the photo's actual capture date, ideally using EXIF metadata, and are there any free tools that can do this?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
2 Answers
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Certainly if you have EXIF tags on your photos, either those written by your digital camera, or those you may have added manual to older photos, this is the way to go. "exiftool" is reliable and supports all of the various formats and tags.
For instance, the following command, prints out the creation date of all image files found underneath the 2010 directory.
exiftool -r -csv -s -t -EXIF:CreateDate 2010
Output looks like this:-
2010/11/13/IMG_4266.JPG,2010:11:13 16:51:25
2010/11/13/IMG_4268.JPG,2010:11:13 16:52:12
2010/11/09/IMG_4234.JPG,2010:11:09 19:08:04
...
2010/10/15/IMG_4301.JPG,2010:10:15 20:51:54
2010/10/15/IMG_4302.JPG,2010:10:15 20:52:08
2010/10/15/IMG_4305.JPG,2010:10:15 21:01:06
2010/10/15/IMG_4299.JPG,2010:10:15 20:38:58
49 directories scanned
625 image files read
You can then use this information to search for files in the dates you are interested in. I believe there is also a graphical version of exiftool for Windows (exiftoolGUI) which might be more friendly to use.
Originally by user3219. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user3219
14y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes — the best approach is to search the images’ EXIF capture date rather than the file-system creation date.
A commonly recommended free tool is ExifTool. It can recursively scan folders and read tags such as EXIF CreateDate, which usually reflects when the photo was actually taken. One example command from the community is:
exiftool -r -csv -s -t -EXIF:CreateDate 2010
That lists each image file and its capture date for everything under the chosen folder. From that output, you can identify files shot in April.
If you prefer a graphical tool, Picasa was mentioned as being able to search photos by month taken, and AMOK EXIF Sorter was also suggested.
Keep in mind this only works well when the images have EXIF metadata (or manually added date metadata for older scanned photos). If some files lack EXIF date information, they may not be found by month-based searches.
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