antp.be forum

Hi!

I have been using Ant Renamer for a few days and it seems to be the piece of software I have been waiting for!

I would like to suggest two new features for Ant Renamer:

1) an option to add/subtract a number of seconds from the EXIF date/time value and use this modified date/time for renaming (would be great to create filenames with the correct date/time even if the camera clock was set to the wrong time; e.g. %DateTimeOriginal+3600% to add 1 hour to the EXIF date/time)

2) use any EXIF tag by its tag id (some canon/nikon digital cameras store additional information in non-standard fields).

Greetings,
Christian

Hi,

1. This was already previously asked, I'll see what I can do but as the date/time is get as a text string and not as a numeric data I am not sure that its format will be easy to process in all cases (is it standardized?)

2. What do you mean by "tag id"? I do not use a predefined tag list (or at least not that I am aware of), I use a library to access these tags so what is possible depends on what that library offers. Maybe it has support for that.
If you can give me a sample pic I can check if there is a way to retreive such info.

Hi!

ad 1) As far as I know, the date/time format in EXIF tags is yyyy:mm:dd hh:nn:ss (note that the : is used as separator for the date value). I did a quick check in the internet and did not find any other information. So parsing the EXIF date into a date value and adding/subtracting a specific amount of seconds should not be too difficult.

I suggest a string like %DateTimeOriginal+3600% as a placeholder for this feature, because + and - do not appear in EXIF tags and so it could easily be determined if the value of an EXIF tag should be incremented or decremented (check the date/time EXIF tags for presence of + or -, split, check for numeric value, ...).

ad 2) See the links below, each EXIF tag has a tag number (I suppose this is the byte code which is used to identify the tag). My Canon digital camera for example (Powershot S70) stores the SubjectDistance not in the standard EXIF field for SubjectDistance. When I use IrfanView (a free image viewer) I can read out the SubjectDistance by referencing the tag #44.

I have a 3KB demo picture with the Canon tags, I can send it as a mail if you want to.

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exi ... /EXIF.html
http://exif.photofb.com/jpeg-exif-description.php

Greeting, Christian

Thanks, I'll check that when I've few time. I already did few change to Ant Renamer and plan to release a version in a not too far future, so I could made these changes at the same time as they would be quite easy to do.
If you could send me a sample image it would be easier for the tests.

Hi Antoine!

I sent the sample image to site-contact@antp.be - I hope this is the correct mail-address.

I'm looking forward to see a new version of AntRenamer - I'm quite sorry my knowledge on Delphi is not good enough to give more support to this project.

Greetings, Christian

Thanks, I received the e-mail. I'll recontact you if I need more info

Hi Antoine (and Christian),

Really great program!!! Have been using others, but this has great features and is easy to use. I use it for pictures taken over a period of 10yrs. Thousands and many folders that keep changing to improve the sorts and directories.

It took me a bit of time to realize that %datetime% applies to mp3, and that I should use %datetimeoriginal% (date taken) for pictures (.jpg). It would be nice to have another choice showing this. It would also be nice if one was able to choose the format of the date/time, AND also increase/decrease the date or time (forgetting to change when crossing time zones for example).

I am new to forums, and have briefly read some other comments and they seem to want similar features. I use a date YYYMMDDxX_infront of all my pictures. The "x" is a letter to order sub groups of that date. The "X" is a letter rating to select favorites or family or reduced size or bad but keep. I use a resizer that keeps the EXIF data in the smaller file(Microsoft).

The EXIF extracts a string with date and time. It seems it would have to be changed to a number in order to do the increase/decrease the value (with checks), and then convert to the formatted string.

I can get what I want by repeated use of actions, but one always wants an easy way if possible, and if others would want it also.

I have some other comments regarding batches, but will make a posting with subject.

Regards
Clive

datetime vs datetimeoriginal depends on the camera which stored info, and if the file was modified or not.
Indeed I should mention the latter one in the program, it is on my to-do list.

About increase/descrease time and/or date, I plan to add that as a separate action as I sometimes need it for file names, but for files which already have such name, not for exif. So it will be possible to combine both actions by running them together.

Hi Antoine,

Thanks for quick reply.

I battled with understanding the Reg Exp but after I grasped what it was doing and how it works, I found a way to use it to format the date. Crude but works. By changing the order of the BackRefs, the order of YYMMDD can be changed.

Reg Exp is ^..(..).(..).(..).........
New Name is $1$2$3
Current File Name is 2008-08-13 12-30-33_100_0108.jpg
New File Name is 080813_100_0108.jpg

I made up a list of simple exmples stored in a text file that illustrate very basic logic, and am happy to share it is you wish.

Found an interesting site, but wish to send a private message to you on that site, and will have to work out how to do that. It is now late.

Cheers
Clive

Any info which could help other users is welcome.
You can eventually make a new topic with these exemples that you mention, if you wish.