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

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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