exiv2 command line power

Does this sound familiar to you: You come back from a holiday with your family or friends and want to merge photos taken with 4 different cameras. However, somebody forgot to adjust the date (or did not set the daylight saving time accordingly). Hmm.

This problem can be solved easily. exiv2 is a program to read and write Exif image metadata and image comments. It offers a very easy command line interface and shortcuts to batch rename files (e.g., by time and date) or to change Exif flags.

The exiv2 homepage.

Examples from the manual

Some examples from the manual (man exiv2):

exiv2 *.jpg

Prints a summary of the Exif information for all JPEG files in the directory.

exiv2 rename img_1234.jpg

Renames img_1234.jpg (taken on 13-Nov-05 at 22:58:31) to 20051113_225831.jpg.

exiv2 -r':basename:_%Y%m' rename img_1234.jpg

Renames img_1234.jpg to img_1234_200511.jpg.

exiv2 -et img1.jpg img2.jpg

Extracts the Exif thumbnails from the two files into img1-thumb.jpg and img2-thumb.jpg.

Adjust date and time

We use the adjust switch from above:

ad | adjust

Adjust Exif time stamps by the given time. Time adjustment is in the format [-]HH[:MM[:SS]]. Examples: 1 adds one hour, 1:01 adds one hour and one minute, -0:00:30 subtracts 30 seconds.

An example:

exiv2 adjust -a 1 *.jpg

adds one hour to the time stamp of all JPG files in the working directory.

Batch rename

After you have adjusted the time stamps of the different cameras, you may want to rename the files, e.g.:

exiv2 rename *.jpg

renames all JPG files in the working directory to date_time.jpg, something very useful.