B10[mg]

If I am not mistaken, Joffie, a long time ago, pointed me to Matthias Wandel's jhead. This tiny little beast has proven its' power to me lately and I'm very impressed by it all.

After my wedding, I received a lot of images from different cameras that I'd like to put together in a gallery. The only bad thing was that, except for Joffie, no one of the photographers seem to care about their date and time settings too much. So if I'd throw together these images, they wouldn't be sorted chronologically.

Jhead can help you out here. By comparing the images of the cameras, you can spot the time difference (and thus by how minutes/hours/days the EXIF information is off). After you found that, jhead will alter all files for you automagically. For instance, all my jpegs are off by 1 hour and 12 minutes:

$ jhead -ta+1:12 *.JPG

Now that wasn't too hard. At least all the software that use EXIF info, can order the files properly again.

You still have the problem with software that sorts pictures based on filename. Since all these cameras use different formats, why not rename everything based on the timestamp?

$ jhead -n *.JPG

And there we go. Now all software should be able to display your pictures properly... except when they ignore EXIF and don't rotate images where needed. No problem!

$ jhead -autorot *.JPG

With three simple commands, I now merged all the images into one workable way. Jhead can do a heck of a lot more, but I'll have to study that. Up to now I didn't really had the need to try the other parameters, but feel free to comment your success/horror stories ;-)

jhead, EXIF