How can I use ExifTool to set all photos in a folder to the earliest capture date?

Question

I need all images in one folder to share the same date stamp for delivery. For example, a concert started late on 04.12.2017 and ran past midnight into 05.12.2017, but the agency wants every image labeled with the earlier date.

Is there a way with ExifTool to read the dates from all files in a directory, find the earliest one, and then write that date back to every file in the set? If the dates already match, nothing should change.

user50598 · Answer

This is the solution. It also contains imprivements to the original script.

#!/bin/tcsh -f


# remove all Umlaute
exiftool -L -overwrite_original -api "Filter=s/ä/ae/g;s/ö/oe/g;s/ü/ue/g;s/Ä/Ae/g;s/Ö/Oe/g;s/Ü/Ue/g;s/ß/ss/g" -TagsFromFile @ -all:all .


# add ", " to the caption:

exiftool '-caption-abstract<${caption-abstract}, ' .

# set all dates to the earliest date
set earliest_date="`exiftool -DateCreated -fileorder DateCreated -q -s3 . | head -1`"
set latest_date="`exiftool -DateCreated -fileorder DateCreated -q -s3 . | tail -1`"

if ( "$earliest_date" == "$latest_date" ) then
   echo "checked date"
else
   echo "earliest date is $earliest_date and latest date is $latest_date"
   echo "setting DateCreated to $earliest_date and TimeCreated to unknown"
   exiftool -DateCreated=$earliest_date .
   exiftool -TimeCreated="00:00:00" .
endif

How can I use ExifTool to set all photos in a folder to the earliest capture date?

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