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Here's an example of what my .jpg files look like:

screenshot of list of image files

I want to append either the "Date" or "Date taken" info — not the "Date created" or "Date modified" info. I saw this answer but I think it would only do the latter. Also, I would like the date formatted as YYYYMMDD or YYYY-MM-DD, no times included. Can someone please help? I know enough python to run a script but definitely not enough to actually write or troubleshoot one. :\

If anyone knows how to do this in R, I'm much more comfortable there.

martineau
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Jon
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  • The formatting of the date is governed by your OS. – mapf Oct 01 '21 at 21:45
  • To do what you want in just about any language you will need to be able to get the image's [metadata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata#Image_metadata) in order to add any of it to the file's name. Python has no modules in its standard library that can do this, so you would need to find a third-party one to do it. I think the [Pillow](https://pypi.org/project/Pillow/) module support reading such info from JPEG files. Note that this info is often stored in [EXIF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exif) (exchangeable image file format) format tags attached to the file. – martineau Oct 02 '21 at 00:04
  • What exactly is Date or Date taken time if it is not Date created or Date modified time? In R, you can look into `?file.info` – Ronak Shah Oct 02 '21 at 04:30

1 Answers1

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If I have understood your request correctly, please find below a proposed solution to your problem using the packages exifr and stringr. With some adaptations for your specific case (i.e. file extension and path diretory), it should work.

library(exifr)
library(stringr)

# Retrieve all images with extension .jpg from your working directory 
# (the file extension and possibly the file path must be adapted to your case)
files <- list.files(path = getwd(), pattern = "*.jpg")

# Read images Exif metadata
dat <- read_exif(files)

# Retrieve file names and info about dates from Exif metadata
dat[ ,c(grep(pattern = "^FileName", names(dat)), grep(pattern = "Date", names(dat)))]

# Choose the desired date (here, I chose the "FileModifyDate" column which corresponds to the dates the images were taken - i.e. column #2)
chosenDate <- dat[ ,c(grep(pattern = "^FileName", names(dat)), grep(pattern = "Date", names(dat)))][,2]


# Append file names with dates 
# (Do not forget to change the file extension in paste0() according to your case - here the extension is ".jpg") 
file.rename(files, 
            paste0(file_path_sans_ext(files),"_", 
                   gsub(":","-",sapply(chosenDate, stringr::str_extract, ".*(?= )")),
                   ".jpg"))
lovalery
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