Watch how to batch rename files by date taken with bulk rename utility. Check out our blog post for the full breakdown of the program. That’s where Batch JPEG Date Changer for Windows and CM Batch JPEG Date Changer for Mac comes to the rescue. This tutorial works the same for both applications. wpadcamp1 Unlike most file date changers, Batch JPEG Date Changer comes with the Variable Date Change feature which lets you apply date maths to adjust the file dates.
This post talks about how to batch rename file extensions from command line. No 3rd party tools are required. At the end of the post, you can find a download link for the batch file script.
Batch rename file extensions in bulk from CMD
We can change the extension of files in batch using rename command. For example, let’s say you have set of files with extension .log and you want to rename them to .txt. You can do this with the below command
The drawback with this command is, we can’t use it to rename file extensions recursively in the sub folders. Next, we’ll look at a solution which allows us to do so.
Recursively batch rename file extensions
If you want to rename files from one extension to another, recursively in all sub folders, then you can use the below command.
For example, if you want to rename all xml files to txt files, the command would be as below
Remove file extensions in batch
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The below command would remove extension for the specified file types.
If you want a batch file script, it can be downloaded from the below link:
Batch file script for renaming file extensions in bulk
Add prefix to file names in batch
If you want to add any prefix to file names, it can be done as in the below example. Here we try to add ‘photo’ to every jpg file in the current folder and subfolders.
Similarly, we can add a number to a file name.
Handling names with white spaces
If the new name you want to assign to the files has white space within it, it can be done by adding double quotes around the file name. So that forfiles does not misinterpret this doublequotes, you need to escape them with ‘’
For example to add ” – pic.jpg” to each of the jpg files, the command would be as below.
If, like me, you have digital photo’s stretching back to the early days of digital cameras and even scans of film and slides, then you may have the same issue I had attaching the right date to the file. I have over 35,000 digital images, so developed a little command line tool to help called ‘Image Processing Console‘ (https://github.com/nrogoff/ImageProcessingConsole).
Modern cloud photo facilities like Microsoft OneDrive Photos and Google Photos automatically organise images based on the dates. Which is great, unless you are missing the correct ‘Date Taken‘. These and other catalogs seem to use a preference order as so where they get this date from. I imagine it’s something like
- Date in the image metadata (EXIF, IPTC or XMP!). There are several dates often stored here. Exactly which is considered the definitive ‘Date Taken’ is not clear.
- If no metadata found , then the image files created date is used. This can and is often completely wrong if you scanned a photo or even did copying and editing.
In Windows you can easily view which of your images have valid ‘Date Taken‘.
- In Windows Explorer, change the view to ‘Details’, then right-click on the columns and add the ‘Date taken’ column.
- You should then see a listing like this, clearly showing if the image does not contain the right metadata.
- If you also turn on the Details pane (View ribbon), you can manually edit the ‘Date taken’, as well as other details.
Some images are too old to have metadata, other have lost their metadata after being edited and yet more are missing it as they were scanned direct from photographs, slides and film.
The created and modified dates can also easily become useless once they are copied from system to system and disk to disk.
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Image Processing Console (open source project)
To resolve missing ‘Date Taken‘ metadata in images files, I have just created an open-source command line tool. This tool can be used to set a specific ‘Date Taken’ on one or more files, or you get ask it to infer a shot taken date based on other files close by.
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You can get more details on GitHub at https://github.com/nrogoff/ImageProcessingConsole and download the latest release or source code here. It’s functionality is currently limited to JPG’s only.
Just unzip the ‘ImageProcessingConsole.zip‘ and extract it to some folder. Then open command console at this location.
Syntax
Bulk update missing ‘Date Taken’
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The most useful facility is when you have the odd image here and there that does not have a ‘Date Taken‘. This will probably be the images that you did some work on and saved a copy etc..
If you don’t supply a ‘shot taken date‘ (-s) then the app will try to infer a date based on image files in the same folder that do have dates.
The app will find the closest file by searching the files before and after when ordered alphabetically ascending.
When targeting specific files (without specifying a ‘shot taken date‘), we can see as shown below, that Faces-28.jpg will be given the 26/05/2006 02:21, but Faces-30.jpg will given 18/04/2004 07:49
When targeting a folder then the preceding date cascades down.
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