Bulk Rename Photos

Problem

I take a lot of photos on my phone and I want to quickly rename them all into a standard format.

Solution

for file in $(ls *.jpg); do mv -n $file $(exiftool -d "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S" -DateTimeOriginal -S -s $file).jpg; done

The script above will rename all images in the current directory to the time they were taken.

The resulting files will look like this:

20220514_155042.jpg
20220508_163754.jpg
20220507_114358.jpg

Details

At a high level, this command will iterate over the results of the ls file and apply a mv command to each one. The output file name of the mv command is based on the output of the exiftool command.

Here is the command broken down into pieces:

• for file in $(ls *.jpg);
  • Get the path to all files in the current directory that end with .jpg
• exiftool -d "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S" -DateTimeOriginal -S -s $file
  • Extract the time a photo was taken from the file metadata and print it in a custom format
• mv -n $file $(exiftool -d "%Y%m%d_%H%M%S" -DateTimeOriginal -S -s $file).jpg;
  • Rename the original file to a new name based on the time the photo was taken

You can quickly tweak the script in the following ways:

• Update the ls *.jpg command and the .jpg at the end of the target file name to handle another file format
• The ls *.jpg command can be changed to apply a filter (e.g. ls my_prefix*.jpg)
• The file format can be tweaked in the mv command
  • %Y%m%d_%H%M%S determines how the "date taken" value is converted to a string
  • You can add custom prefixes or suffixes by adding text around the $(...) section