Arranging pictures in finder by date taken?

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Hi guys, Its my first post here and I just got my fist macbook.

Ive always been a windows user, so using OSX is new to me. My questions today is about photo organizing.

In windows, the way I organize my pictures is by date when picture was taken. So my folders look something like this: My Pictures>2012>02-04-2012 - Subject>picture.jpg

I have a lot of u-organized older pictures from the late 90's that has the date in the extif data, so to organized the large cluster of pictures all i had to do is to click the "arrange by" - date taken. and it would put everything from the oldest picture to the newest. Then I would just select pictures from the same day and put it in a folder.

Now I'm slowly learning the mac, so i go to the FINDER and then go to pictures and try to arrange my pictures, but all the options that I see is arrange by date added, BUT its the date added to this folder and NOT the date created of the picture. So im really confused.. How can i see when the pictures were created and so I can arrange all of them in order. Is there a third party addon that will allow this? Im really lost here. I really need this feature. Is it there or am I out of luck?

Your help is really needed. Thank you all.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
13" Late 2011 MBP,iPad '3' 32gb,iPhone4 32gb
Luckily, new Mac's these days ship with a program called "iPhoto", which will do precisely what you're trying to do here.

If you haven't already clicked on it on your exploration of your new machine, give it a try. Once you've imported all your images into iPhoto, you can sort by date shot in there.

Any more issues, don't hesitate to shout!

Congrats on your new purchase, and welcome to the forums!
 
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Hey Chuckoir, thanks for the reply. Well im assuming the iphoto would arrange all the pictures just in this app? I am a cross platform user, so If ill edit the folders, I would like to be able to move them already re-arranged into folders.

Thanks again.
 
C

chas_m

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Sorry, I missed the part where you explained why you need to keep the same photo library synced on two computers with completely different platforms ...
 
C

chas_m

Guest
My post was not a "Apple doesn't support this, so why would you want to do it" comment. It was pointing out that without sufficient detail on exactly what you are trying to do, we'll both waste a lot of time (such as you did writing your acerbic and pointless rebuttal) guessing.

You weren't clear in your initial post about what you want to do, and thus didn't get an answer that fully met your needs. I might have an answer for you, but first I need you to drop the attitude and tell us *what you are trying to do exactly.* Are you attempting to set up a shared photo library across platforms? Are you planning on mirroring one library between machines? Do you just prefer to hand-organize things for unclear reasons? Would having software organize the photos internally in the described manner do the job, or do you need it to be a Finder folder structure?
 
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Your Mac's Specs
Way... way too many specs to list.
There is an commandline utility called jhead, that will do this. That is, change the file modification date to the creation date in exif.

So if I take a picture I copied over some time ago and run the utility, it changes the creation date to the date in the exif

Original file info.
Code:
mikembp:Pictures mike$ jhead otter.jpg |egrep -vi 'comment|iptc|time created|city|record|keywor|datecreated|timecreated|notice'
File name    : otter.jpg
File size    : 773560 bytes
File date    : 2011:06:18 18:25:54
Camera make  : NIKON CORPORATION
Camera model : NIKON D200
Date/Time    : 2011:06:18 18:25:54
Resolution   : 1680 x 1125
Flash used   : No
Focal length : 135.0mm  (35mm equivalent: 202mm)
Exposure time: 0.0040 s  (1/250)
Aperture     : f/2.8
ISO equiv.   : 1600
Whitebalance : Auto
Metering Mode: pattern
Exposure     : aperture priority (semi-auto)

Here's the OS listed creation date
Code:
mikembp:Pictures mike$ ls -l otter.jpg 
-rw-r--r--  1 mike  staff  773560 Aug  2  2011 otter.jpg

then we run the utility and recheck.
Code:
mikembp:Pictures mike$ jhead -ft otter.jpg
otter.jpg
mikembp:Pictures mike$ ls -l otter.jpg 
-rw-r--r--  1 mike  staff  773560 Jun 18  2011 otter.jpg

The utility is available via...

Exif Jpeg header manipulation tool

I used this some time ago to create a small script that renames files using the exif creation date. Here's the script..
Code:
#!/bin/bash
#this script will rename all jpg files in a directory based on exif date
if [ $# -ne 1 ] ; then 
	echo "Usage: $0 /path/to/photo/directory"
	exit
fi

cd $1
jhead -ft *.jpg
declare -i number=1
for x in $(ls *.jpg); do
time=$(ls -lo $x | awk '{print $5"_"$6"_"$7}')
mv $x ${x%.jpg}_${time}_${number}.jpg
number+=1
done
unset number

And some output
Code:
mikembp:testfoo mike$ ls
IMG_1317.jpg IMG_1395.jpg IMG_1399.jpg IMG_1428.jpg IMG_1468.jpg IMG_1482.jpg IMG_1666.jpg IMG_1804.jpg IMG_1997.jpg IMG_2055.jpg
IMG_1337.jpg IMG_1396.jpg IMG_1426.jpg IMG_1443.jpg IMG_1477.jpg IMG_1493.jpg IMG_1724.jpg IMG_1961.jpg IMG_2004.jpg
mikembp:testfoo mike$ PhotoRename .
IMG_1317.jpg
IMG_1337.jpg
IMG_1395.jpg
IMG_1396.jpg
IMG_1399.jpg
IMG_1426.jpg
IMG_1428.jpg
IMG_1443.jpg
IMG_1468.jpg
IMG_1477.jpg
IMG_1482.jpg
IMG_1493.jpg
IMG_1666.jpg
IMG_1724.jpg
IMG_1804.jpg
IMG_1961.jpg
IMG_1997.jpg
IMG_2004.jpg
IMG_2055.jpg
mikembp:testfoo mike$ ls 
IMG_1317_Jul_26_2009_1.jpg  IMG_1396_Aug_22_2009_4.jpg  IMG_1428_Aug_22_2009_7.jpg  IMG_1477_Aug_22_2009_10.jpg IMG_1666_Oct_16_2009_13.jpg IMG_1961_Oct_18_2009_16.jpg IMG_2055_Oct_18_2009_19.jpg
IMG_1337_Jul_26_2009_2.jpg  IMG_1399_Aug_22_2009_5.jpg  IMG_1443_Aug_22_2009_8.jpg  IMG_1482_Aug_22_2009_11.jpg IMG_1724_Oct_16_2009_14.jpg IMG_1997_Oct_18_2009_17.jpg
IMG_1395_Aug_22_2009_3.jpg  IMG_1426_Aug_22_2009_6.jpg  IMG_1468_Aug_22_2009_9.jpg  IMG_1493_Aug_22_2009_12.jpg IMG_1804_Oct_17_2009_15.jpg IMG_2004_Oct_18_2009_18.jpg
mikembp:testfoo mike$
 

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