Update file number from file name using exiftool

Question

I'm clicking photos on a camera (Fuji x100s) that doesn't store the filenumber tag in the exif. Though it adds this information in the file name, eg, DSCF0488.JPG, DSCF0489.JPG, DSCF0490.JPG.

How do I extract this number and set it as the file number?

Could you be more specific about the tool you are using and perhaps give an example of how it should be called? What system are you using? — Tom Fenech, Aug 13 '14 at 15:40

Tom Fenech · Answer 1 · 2014-08-12T23:49:24.113

To extract the numbers from the files in your example, using native bash regex, you could do something like this:

for i in *.JPG; do 
    [[ $i =~ ([[:digit:]]+) ]] && echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
done

Running that loop from the directory containing the files in your question would give the output:

0488
0489
0490

So if you have a tool called exif_script that can add this information to your files, you could do something like:

for photo in *.JPG; do 
    if [[ $photo =~ ([[:digit:]]+) ]]; then
        file_number="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
        exif_script # set number to $file_number
    fi
done

If you don't have a new enough bash to support regular expression matching, you could use sed:

for i in *.JPG; do file_number=$(echo "$i" | sed 's/[^0-9]\{1,\}\([0-9]\{1,\}\).JPG/\1/'); done

The value of $file_number will be the same as in the first piece of code but this approach should work on the vast majority of platforms.

Update file number from file name using exiftool

1 Answers1