How can I organize photos by time of day only, ignoring the date taken?
Asked 5/2/2019
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2 answers
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I need to review a very large set of trail-camera images in Windows and would like to prioritize photos shot between dusk and dawn. Is there a way to sort or group images by the time they were taken while ignoring the date, either through EXIF metadata or Windows Explorer? If Windows can't do this directly, what practical workaround can I use to reorganize the files by hour or time of day?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
7y ago
2 Answers
6
As far as sorting files by time, but not date, I know of no file or image manager that has such a feature. However, it is possible to move or rename files into folders based on your desired parameters.
The "standard" tool for processing files based on Exif data is exiftool. Normally, I would move files into folders based on the date images were taken:
exiftool '-Directory<${DateTimeOriginal}' '-d %Y%m%d' .
To move images into folders based on the Hour they were taken, the command is basically the same, but with a different date format (-d parameter):
exiftool '-Directory<${DateTimeOriginal}' '-d %H' .
You could also rename files according to time-date (rather than the usual date-time), then sort by filename.
exiftool '-FileName<${DateTimeOriginal}%-c.%le' '-d %H%M%S-%Y%m%d' .
The above commands are constructed for use on Linux or MacOS. For Windows, you would have to change the single quotes to double, and possibly make other adjustments, which are left as an exercise for the reader.
Originally by user75526. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user75526
7y ago
0
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Windows Explorer generally does not offer a built-in way to sort photos by EXIF time-of-day while ignoring the date. In most cases, the capture date and time are stored together in the EXIF DateTimeOriginal field, so the practical solution is to reorganize the files based on that metadata.
A commonly recommended tool is ExifTool. You can use it to move images into folders by hour, for example using DateTimeOriginal to create folders like 00, 01, 02, etc. You can also rename files so the time comes first in the filename, then sort by filename in Explorer.
Examples from the community answers:
- Move into hour folders: use ExifTool with DateTimeOriginal and a format like %H
- Rename files with time first: use ExifTool so filenames begin with HHMMSS
Another possible workaround is using software that can batch-edit file dates from EXIF data, then sort by standard file timestamps, but that changes file metadata and should be tested on copies first.
With a dataset this large, work on copies first and test on a smaller subset before processing everything.
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