Renaming (and copying) photos to include the original capture date and time with ExifTool and AppleScript

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A friend of mine, David Leedy, sent me a direct message simply asking,

What do you use? Aperture? Lightroom? iPhoto? I need to tame a LOT of pictures.. MANY duplicates…

After some back and forth I thought of a way of handling this situation without any commercial applications. I knew he was an Apple user, so I took this as a chance to improve my AppleScript skills and do something beyond adding a “Play Slideshow” button to my parent’s iMac, a feature my mom sorely missed coming from a PC running Microsoft XP.

I originally thought I would need the graphical help of Automator, but that wound up being more than I needed. The end goal is to get something like IMG00223.jpg renamed and copied somewhere to IMG00223_20091222_135454.jpg. The idea is that even if you had two of the same cameras, that maybe you both received at the same time, the chances that you took a photo, on the same day, and the same time, and with the same image sequence are hopefully non-existant. Once you run your photos through the script, you would then run a de-duplication program against one output directory of one person’s photos against the other person or persons.

I read George Starcher’s post on how he was using AppleScript to parse text and use Yahoo! Pipes after hearing him talk about it on a podcast and thought I could use a similar tactic to get the parts of the text I wanted. So off I went into AppleScript…
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Backing up your photographs and more – Why I don’t recommend a Drobo

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Whenever I am hear about storage solutions for photographers, I frequently hear the praises of Drobos, and while I do think they can serve a purpose, I can’t bring myself to recommend them. There is a common phrase among storage/backup architects that usually goes something like, “If it’s not in three places, it doesn’t exist”.  Getting that third place, and even the second place will eventually prove to be expensive, time consuming and a little too cumbersome using Drobos.

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