Jhead - Today's free file

Regular visitors to this site will know that I've been on the lookout for the perfect free program to rename digital camera pics based on EXIF date info. The ideal program, besides being free, has to be flexible enough to let me name files with characters that have no business being in file names (like spaces and punctuation), so that I can have files named, for example, October 17, 2005.jpg. After many false starts, I've come across what looks like the perfect program, and it's an oldie but a goodie: jhead, an open-source command-line program that can rename files and do much, much more. With no interface and only minimal documentation, jhead takes a bit of work to use, but no more so than any other command line app. The program can perform virtually any kind of manipulation on EXIF data, including outputting it to a text file, stripping it out altogether, editing it or even adding EXIF data to files that don't have any. It's cross-platform, too, and will run on everything from Windows to Linux to Mac OSX. And as a command-line program, it can easily be incorporated into scripts; I've already set up basic Applescripts and batch files to use in my digital workflow. Sure, a GUI might be nice. But sometimes, you just don't need one to do the job, and jhead is proof of that.

 

Tags: opensource