This meant I had a bunch of different images all with the same creation dates and, thus, all the same filename if I ran my Hazel rules on them. One of the previous photo storage cloud services – either Loom or Everpix (the culprit, I think) – re-stamped the file creation dates. My Hazel rules sort files based on their creation dates. Sometimes this data is missing or incorrect. It relies on accurate file creation dates and EXIF data – the metadata stored in all image files. This approach has one major drawback, enforced upon it by other apps. Duplicates are now easily spotted, because they are in the same folder with the same filename (a number is appended if filenames are identical). I usually have a pretty good memory of roughly when important events happened in life and there are plenty of ways to view folders of images as thumbnails (see Federico’s article for a round-up of these).
Videos are renamed and sorted into a video sub-folder of each year:ĭeadly exciting, I know, but I’ve wasted so much time searching for photos and so much drive space with duplicates that the time spent getting this to work has been fantastic for me. The files are also renamed with date and time, such as “ 3.08.29.jpg”: Then I have a rule to sort the photos into date based folders, by year and then simply date. Similar to Federico, my Hazel rules delete screenshots, since I generally don’t want to keep them, but I also have Camera Sync set up not to upload screenshots anyway: Once uploaded I keep a handful of photos of my family on my iPhone, but otherwise delete all the others. I use Camera Sync on the iPhone to upload all my photos to Dropbox and use Hazel to rename and sort them based on their metadata. I decided to follow most of Federico Viticci’s photo workflow and go for near Camera Roll Zero.
#How to edit exif metadata on mac exiftool full#
My iPhone was getting too full and I was nervous to delete older images in case that was the only copy. Having tried all these services on and off, I could no longer remember which photos I had backed up from my iPhone and where. Since Dropbox upgraded their plans, I know have the opposite problem, which is that my 1.1TB of cloud space is larger than my laptop’s hard drive. Back then, the whole point of using another service was because I didn’t have enough space on Dropbox for over 72GB of images and videos. I tried various automatic services, such as Dropbox’s automated Camera Upload feature and I also tried Everpix before they shut down and then moved to Loom, but then were acquired by Dropbox. But I would be very sad to lose the photos of my daughter when she was tiny. Almost everything else is either replaceable, recoverable or possible to take a Zen-like attitude to letting go of. Of all things that would be hard to replace if all my devices caught fire and all my backups failed, the photos would be the one I care about most. Because it was a drag, I didn’t do it all that often and I lost track of which photos were where. Do I use iCloud, Dropbox or iPhoto? I used to religiously use Lightroom, but it was always a drag importing photos from my iPhone into Lightroom and sorting them. Since I had an iPhone, everything got worse. Multiple versions of iPhoto and Lightroom, not to mention a few corrupt libraries and recoveries have left their scars. Like many people, my photo libraries have grown to many gigabytes over the years, encrusted with cruft from various photo management apps.
If you’re short on time the ExifTool command that helped me is right at the end – skip down there and copy and paste.įor anyone else who can’t sleep, it might be useful, but I won’t be offended if you skip reading this. Nevertheless, since it took me a little while to work out, maybe someone else searching for the same issue will benefit from it.
#How to edit exif metadata on mac exiftool how to#
This post is really a note-to-self for when I next have to remember how to deal with missing photo and QuickTime movie metadata.
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