S and I decided to get a wedding photographer in addition to allowing our guests to take as many photos as they wanted of all aspects of our wedding (except when we were getting dressed [and ... undressed]). There were a few reasons for this one of which being the several horror stories we've heard about people's digital media dying causing them to lose all pictures of their wedding. Ick.

The problem is that there are a fajillion pictures and it's really hard to order them into a single consistent timeline. The wedding photographer we had1 had four cameras and took some 800 pictures. My dad took another 100 or so. Other people took a bunch, too. Right now I'm working with 1200+ pictures all of which are pretty big (between 5 MB and 10 MB each). It's not feasible to tweak them all by hand to order them. I didn't want to leave them unordered--my soul shudders at that thought. I needed a way to do batch processing to reorder pictures from a bunch of cameras into a nice timeline.

More after the break...

BREAK

First thing I did was put all the pictures that had no EXIF information to the side. There weren't many of them and I don't see any way to batch process them.

We're now left with 1000+ pictures all of which have EXIF information that we can work with. Interesting properties of the problem:

all of the pictures have DateTimeOriginal and SerialNumber headers in the EXIF data pictures from a single camera have a consistent timeline in the sense that if picture 2 from camera A comes before picture 3 from camera A by 14 seconds, then that's what happened the time from all the pictures from camera A are a constant offset from all the pictures from camera B

This is all pretty obvious and there's nothing exciting here, but it does reduce the problem to picking a camera as a baseline and then figuring out how far off in seconds and minutes the other cameras are from the baseline. That's pretty easy.

First thing I do is get exiftool and run it like this to rename all the files according to their timestamp and serialnumber:

exiftool '-FileName Then I copied all the files into a thumbs directory and in the thumbs directory I used mogrify which comes with ImageMagick to create thumbnails: for i in `ls *.jpg`; do mogrify -quality 65 -geometry 150; done Then I did this to figure out all the serial numbers of the cameras that took these photos: exiftool -SerialNumber *.jpg | sort -u Then I wrote a Python script (any language will do) to build an index of the images using timeline offsets: import os, time, datetime # serial number -> (offset(minute, second), color) OFFSETS = { "1020415017": ((0, 37), "#ff5555"), # red "1420918126": ((1, 11), "#ff55ff"), # purple "1621009923": ((1, 9), "#55ff55"), # green "620306618": ((0, 0), "#5555ff") } # blue (baseline) def getinfo(fn): t = fn.split("-", 1)[1] t = t.split("_", 1) cam = t[1] cam = cam.split(".")[0] t = t[0] print fn, t t = time.strptime(t, "%H%M%S") # hardcoded year, month, and day t = datetime.datetime(2007, 05, 26, t[3], t[4], t[5]) offset = OFFSETS[cam][0] t = t - datetime.timedelta(0, offset[1], 0, 0, offset[0]) return (t, cam, fn) def build(): files = os.listdir(os.getcwd()) files = [f for f in files if f.endswith(".jpg")] pics = [ getinfo(fn) for fn in files ] pics.sort() out = open("index.html", "w") out.write("<html><body><table border=\"1\">

") for t, cam, fn in pics: out.write(""" <tr><td> <table> <tr><td bgcolor="#aaaaaa">name</td><td>%s</td></tr> <tr><td bgcolor="#aaaaaa">camera</td><td bgcolor="%s">%s</td></tr> <tr><td bgcolor="#aaaaaa">datestamp</td><td>%s</td></tr> </table> </td><td><img src="%s"></td></tr>""" % (fn, offsets[cam][1], cam, repr(t), fn)) out.write("</table></body></html>") out.close() if __name__ == "__main__": build() Note that I color-code the cameras. I find this makes it really easy to eyeball the timeline without trying to distinguish between similar-looking serial numbers. I run that in my thumbs directory and it builds an index.html page that I can look at with a web-browser. The index.html has the offsets factored in. I look through the pictures and tweak the offsets until all the cameras are consistent with one timeline. Once I have a final set of offsets, I go through the pictures for each camera and (very carefully) do this: exiftool "-AllDates-=0:0:0 0:M:S" *SN.jpg ^ ^ ^^ replacing:

M with the minute offset,

with the minute offset, S with the second offset, and

with the second offset, and SN with the camera serial number

Then you do another pass at renaming files and the files should then be in the same consistent timeline and in alphabetical order by filename.

After I worked out the process it took a couple of hours. We had the advantage of having a couple of points during the wedding where a lot of photographs were taken and it was obvious as to what order they needed to be in.