Set to oldest date from Exif meta or file name

Step 0 - install exiftool from below

👉 Step 0.1

Save the oldest_datetime_config in the home folder C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME or in your home directory ~ or in the same folder where you have installed exiftool. This step is important for the following steps to be successful.

Rename the file to .ExifTool_config

You can find these in a script here but I have found that running the commands in the pic folder I mentioned in the options below are much much faster than running these through python script exif-scripts/setToOldestDate.py For faster processing you can run these commands directly in powershell from the pic folder you are planning.

If you are running WSL then run these commands from poweshell and not WSL are the file system read write from the windows virtualization will blow up your ram and will slow down the process to a halt.

🦺 Note that these scripts are recursive and will affect all the subfolders are well.

Well … now — pick your options:

Option 1 - In case you need to pick the date from the file name.

This is pretty flexible and fuzzy parser from exiftool but if you want it to be absolutely sure then you can remane the file to include yyyymmdd_hhmmss and remove all the other number before it (after is OK).

exiftool "-FileModifyDate<filename" −overwrite_original -S -m -progress -ee -q -q ./

Option 2 - set all the dates to the oldest date

exiftool -overwrite_original "-FileModifyDate<OldestDateTime" "-ModifyDate<OldestDateTime" "-DateTimeOriginal<OldestDateTime" "-CreateDate<OldestDateTime" "-GPSDateTime<OldestDateTime" -S -m -progress -ee -q -q ./

Option 3 - set the name of the file in PXL_yyyymmdd_hhmmss-[number-if-conflict].extension

exiftool "-filename<OldestDateTime" -d PXL_%Y%m%d_%H%M%S%%-c.%%e -S -m -ee -progress -q -q ./

to push all the files in the current directory use

adb push -a . /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/

-a is to preserve the attributes.

⏳ Refresh Android Media Store

As a last step, you need to refresh the android media store database to let google photos know which new files to backup. Currently it does not always detect automatically so why wait for that. Install Refresh MediaStore and run it after the adb push is complete from the phone. Then you can open Google Photos and see that the backup is starting.

pratyushtewari / exif-scripts