[SOLVED] exiftool and Date/Time Original

[Martin1001]

I've been using

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exiftool file.name |grep -i date

to extract exif data for a specific photo-image file.

Today I accidentally entered

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exiftool file.name !grep -i date

and the result was that exif data was returned for every photo-image file in the directory.

Unsurprisingly it also works with

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exiftool !grep -i date

Is there a command that will return, for every photo-image file in the directory
'File Name'
'Date/Time Original'
and nothing else?

[t42]

Try

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exiftool -createdate *

as for the exclamation mark probably you are understanding (based on your "Unsurprisingly") that you invoke the last instance of that command from history.

[Martin1001]

t42, actually I have very little understanding at all of terminal commands. Since my mistyped command clearly ignored file.name, it seemed superfluous, so I tried it again omitting that detail.

Thank you for supplying the command. That's really useful.

Guessing from what you supplied, I tried

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exiftool -createdate -datetimeoriginal *

which resulted either in identical values for both 'Create Date' and 'Date/Time Original', or only a value for 'Create Date'.

======== AAA.JPG
Create Date : 2019:12:10 20:22:42
Date/Time Original : 2019:12:10 20:22:42
======== BBB.JPG
Create Date : 2020:10:12 09:37:50
Date/Time Original : : : : :

Might 'Create Date' and 'Date/Time Original' ever return different values? What I am after is the date that the photograph was taken, using images taken on my own cameras (Nikon and Sony). Recently I've been checking the values returned by Date/Time Original against known days that certain photographs were taken, and that's exactly what it seems to return consistently.

[t42]

Might 'Create Date' and 'Date/Time Original' ever return different values?

You just confirmed that. ) I think a difference created by image digitizing can be neglected. In my cameras all three concerned tags are the same. Anyway the createdate can be absent, depending on your camera, and if you plan to batch rename files based on this tags, you need to check if a file contains this information with 'exiftool -createdate filename' , and, if it is absent, use DateTimeOriginal tag.
Here is data from my random file

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exiftool -AllDates DSCF1372.JPG

An output:

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======== DSCF1372.JPG
Date/Time Original              : 2010:06:06 08:15:37
Create Date                     : 2010:06:06 08:15:37
Modify Date                     : 2010:06:06 08:15:37

gthumb info (or Pix):

exif 2021-05-10 11-32-45.png (8.47 KiB) Viewed 212 times

[Martin1001]

t42, in my case, since I often crop images, Modify Date can be different, but, apart from occasional lack of data for Date/Time Original ( : : : : ), that and Create Date are the same. Many thanks for your help.