I recently needed to update the time stamp on several thousand photos. I have been using a great (Mac) tool for this called 'A Better Finder Attributes 4' from http://www.publicspace.net/. But this time I needed to increment the time stamp for each file sequentially. What to do?
What I came up with used the command line tool, ExifTool, and a script in the Mac Automator to update the EXIF information. Then I used A Better Finder Attributes 4 to update the file creation and modification date/time from the EXIF data.
As I never used ExifTool before I searched around for guidance and found this information helpful. Then I figured that with the use of a script and a variable I could get my desired result of an incremented time stamp. I found this post by Klaus very helpful. All I needed to do was add the variable to his script and I should be all set. This part took a bit longer to figure out than I expected though.
Here's the replacement script that I came up with:
x=0
for f in "$@"
do
x=$(( $x + 1 ))
exiftool -overwrite_original -AllDates+=$x "$f"
done
One of the times I used this process the script appeared to hang. I ended up stopping the script and it seemed to continue processing so there might be a problem with the interaction with the exiftool in the automator job.
While the following process worked for me, I'm wondering if anyone else has a better solution?
