Nobody was Born with Linux Knowledge

I was looking for a free open source solution in order to automatically add timestamps to bunch of pictures and eventually found Max's post and useful script over here: http://dptnt.com/2009/08/add-date-time-stamp-to-jpeg-photos-using-free-software-mac-linux-nix-edition/ Thank you Max very much for providing such a powerful, yet simple tool! And of course thanks to linux who enables us to easily write very useful scripts to perform automated tasks and thanks to ImageMagic for being such a powerful image processing toolkit! 

Add Date Time Stamp to JPEG Photos Using Free Open Source Software To get it started, follow the simple steps. 1. Install ImageMagick

sudo apt-get install ImageMagick

2. Get the font http://www.dafont.com/digital-7.font To make it look like the old 35mm point-and-shoot film camera’s time stamp, you can use a LCD font. Simply downloaded it and unpacked it somewhere. You don’t have to install the fonts. The script can work by a direct link to the font file location. 3. Get the code The following is the complete shell script.

#!/bin/sh
# Change the font variable to point to your font location
font="$HOME/.fonts/digital-7 (mono).ttf"

if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
cat << _EOF_

USAGE: $0 file1 file2 ..., or
$0 *.jpg, or
$0 dir/*.jpg
...

_EOF_
exit
fi

while [ "$1" != "" ]; do
# Skip directories
if [ -d "$1" ]; then
shift
continue
fi
# Skip already converted files (may get overwritten)
if [[ $1 == *_DT* ]]
then
echo "------  Skipping: $1"
shift
continue
fi

# Work out a new file name by adding "_DT" before file extension
file=$1
echo "######  Working on file: $file"
filename=${file%.*}
extension=${file##*.}
output=${filename}_DT.${extension}

# Get the file dimension
dim=$(identify -format "%w %h" "$file")
width=${dim%% *}
height=${dim#* }

# Decide the font size automatically
if [ $width -ge $height ]
then
pointsize=$(($width/30))
else
pointsize=$(($height/30))
fi

echo "        Width: $width, Height: $height. Using pointsize: $pointsize"

# The real deal here
convert "$file" -gravity SouthEast -font "$font" -pointsize $pointsize -fill white -annotate +$pointsize+$pointsize "%[exif:DateTimeOriginal]" "$output"

shift
done

exit 0

  4. Do the work Copy the code into a text editor, save it as “dtstamp.sh” or anything you like. Please note you need to change the 3rd line in the code to point to the font file location. Run the following command to make it executable chmod +x dtstamp.sh To use it, simply run it like this ./dtstamp.sh directory/*.jpg Or, ./dtstamp.sh file1.jpg file2.jpg... After it runs, the script will produce files with “_DT” inserted between the original file name and file extension. The original file is unmodified.