Photo Date

June 14, 2005 12:54 PM

I'm in the process of sorting through some digital photos that are about a year or so old. I'd like to sort them in folders by date (year, month) as I do now. The trouble is, when I "Show Info" the "Date Created" field is blank. [more inside]

These are original the JPEGS, not resaved. Any work I've done on them were saved as copies. Why is the date created feild blank and, more importantly, is there anyway I can find out the date they were originally created? I'm on a Mac 10.4.1. and the camera I used at the time was a Canon A75.

posted by btwillig to technology (6 comments total)

If you open the pictures in Preview and do Get Info from the menu in that application, is there a date saved in the picture file itself?

Most digital cameras will store "EXIF" data in the picture file itself which includes such information as the date & time the photo was taken.

You could also check for this information in iPhoto if you use that. Most image organization tools can read EXIF data no problem.

If there's no EXIF data about the picture, it's possible you didn't have the date and time set right on your camera or something, in which case there isn't really anything you can do.
posted by bcwinters at 1:08 PM on June 14, 2005

The date might be saved in the EXIF data. Get a free EXIF reading program and take a look.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:15 PM on June 14, 2005

Thank you, it does give date created in iphoto, but not from the finder (and couldn't find a "get info" option in Preview). I don't normally use iphoto (runs slow) but may have to now to recover some dates.

I'll check out one of those EXIF programs too, it may save me some time.

Thanks again.
posted by btwillig at 1:26 PM on June 14, 2005

Additionally, Stamp is a nice little freeware app that will sort through your photos for you and rename them using the date/time extracted from the metadata of the photo. Renamed, they will be ordered chronologically.
posted by whatisish at 3:25 PM on June 14, 2005

Oooops. Win32 only. =/
posted by whatisish at 3:28 PM on June 14, 2005

If you email me one photo I'll write a quickie script to sort them into directories. I need the sample photo to test the script. If you're interested, email the photo to: rsalsbury at apple dot com. Also, describe how you'd like the directories organized (eg. seperate directory for each day, for each month, etc.). Writing the script should take about five minutes.
posted by ryanrs at 4:00 PM on June 14, 2005