batch renaming photos using exif data

[bsigrist]

So I had to use photorec recently to recover some photos and other documents from a hard disk that went bad on me. For those of you unfamiliar with photorec, it ignores the filesystem and grabs any multimedia or other files from the disk (whatever it can see). Unfortunately, the original filenames do not persist and you end up with thousands of files such as (f9108815.jpg) in multiple subdirectories.

I want to rename these photos according to their exif data. I have been using NameExif which is a Windows utility but it seems to be stumbling about 10% into the search. This is a 40GB directory with about 800 subdirectories and many thousands of individual files (not all are photos btw).

I was wondering if there might be a better way to script this or perhaps an already built linux utility that I might try in Ubuntu. I am relatively inexperienced with linux, but I would feel okay with running a bash script.

Thank you for any help! Also, if this post is better suited for another forum, let me know and I'll post it there too.

[cariboo907]

There is a utility in the repositories called renrot. You can install it using synaptic.

Jim

[bela83]

Very good utility.
Had to deal with the same problem and it saved my day.
Powerful, many options... Recommended !

[GabrielWolff]

jhead is around 100 times faster than renrot, and I'm not exaggerating.

[slowhand73]

jhead is around 100 times faster than renrot, and I'm not exaggerating.

But jhead works only on JPEG files.

[oldos2er]

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