Namexif: Batch rename your digital camera files with the date and time

by Brad Linder Jan 15th 2008

If you've got a digital camera, we're going to go out on a limb and guess that your computer is littered with files bearing names like DCIM0001.JPG and IMG4527.JPG. Sure, you try to give your photos meaningful labels like "Us at the beach playing catch with our new puppy.jpg" but who has the time?

Namexif won't tell you which images have your adorable new puppy and which show your bratty kid sister. But it will automatically rename most of your images according to the date and time they were taken, which should help you keep your digital photo albums a bit more organized.

As the name suggests, Namexif will only work on images captured using EXIF compliant cameras, but that covers an awful lot of the digital cameras on the market. And if Namexif can't figure out the date and time an image was taken, it just won't rename the picture, so you have nothing to lose by trying it out.

[via No Heat]

Tags: digital-camera, EXIF, Namexif

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Zootropo said 6:21PM on 1-15-2008

I wrote a Nautilus script which does this in Linux with just a couple of clicks a couple of months ago :)

Someone may be interested:
http://mundogeek.net/nautilus-script

Aragorn said 8:18PM on 1-15-2008

I've been using the Photo Organizer FotoAlbum (http://www.fototime.com) to manage and rename my 20,000+ and growing photo base for quite awhile.

tron said 8:47PM on 1-15-2008

Note: Does not work with .nef/.cr2 raw files.

tron said 8:47PM on 1-15-2008

Note: does not work with .NEF/.CR2 RAW files

dp said 8:32AM on 1-16-2008

RenameMaster and XnView are both good in these areas. I have a script in RM that gives me one-click renaming with date & time.

Bruno Padinha said 8:32AM on 1-16-2008

jhead (http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/) does that as well, and since it's command-line, it may be useful for people who want to put it into a script that does other processing.

I use it like this:

jhead -a -exonly -c -ft -nf%1%%Y%%m%%d_%%H%%M%%S **\*.jpg

(it'll rename everything in the current folder and all sub-folders recursively)

hnkelley said 12:34PM on 1-16-2008

Thanks for the tip! I just renamed a couple THOUSAND vacation photos. I post on Image Bam (http://www.imagebam.com/) and they have a 3MB per image limit, but my nice new camera puts out 3.25MB images. So I use PIXResizer (http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm) to change the size. It works with entire directories, changes the size to whatever you set it to, up to 1200 pixel width, can change the format (bmp, jpg, pnp, etc), and other info. I always tell it to increase the size on images that are smaller than the selected size. And, very important for us here, I always tell it to keep the EXIF data.... lucky for me so I could use Namexif!

Chris Carey said 2:34PM on 1-16-2008

Thanks for the linkback Downloadsquad!

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