How to find all photos taken in April - any April?

Question

I have 100+ gB of photos going back 25 years. They are arranged in a directory tree by category, with nested sub-directories.

How can I make a search for all photos taken in a given month, say April, in any of those directories?

I don't think that a Windows search will work as that will probably be the file creation data, which could be a month or two later wen I finally more the files from SD card to PC.

Perhaps searching the EXIF data? Is there a free program which can do that?

Asked by Mawg

Answer

Certainly if you have EXIF tags on your photos, either those written by your digital camera, or those you may have added manual to older photos, this is the way to go. "exiftool" is reliable and supports all of the various formats and tags.

For instance, the following command, prints out the creation date of all image files found underneath the 2010 directory.

 exiftool -r -csv -s -t -EXIF:CreateDate 2010

Output looks like this:-

2010/11/13/IMG_4266.JPG,2010:11:13 16:51:25
2010/11/13/IMG_4268.JPG,2010:11:13 16:52:12
2010/11/09/IMG_4234.JPG,2010:11:09 19:08:04
...
2010/10/15/IMG_4301.JPG,2010:10:15 20:51:54
2010/10/15/IMG_4302.JPG,2010:10:15 20:52:08
2010/10/15/IMG_4305.JPG,2010:10:15 21:01:06
2010/10/15/IMG_4299.JPG,2010:10:15 20:38:58
   49 directories scanned
  625 image files read

You can then use this information to search for files in the dates you are interested in. I believe there is also a graphical version of exiftool for Windows (exiftoolGUI) which might be more friendly to use.

Answered by martyvis

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