Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

As I mentioned, I took about 1,200 photos in Israel. Since these are family vacation photographs, I collaborate with my wife to decide which ones get posted to Gallery on Family Tidings. 1,200 photographs is a lot of decisions. Luckily, Gallery has some tools to help.

First, I create an album for the pictures and make it hidden. Then I take all the candidate photos and upload them to the album. At this point, I can log in and rate them from one to five stars. My wife does the same from her account. After this is done, I keep the ones that have at least three stars. To do this, create an album called “extras” under the subject album. Mark it hidden on the General tab and exclude it from display in the image block on the Album tab. Edit the subject album and change the sort order to “rating”, descending. Back in the album, find the first photograph rated two or lower and from its menu, select “Move photo”. Select all the photographs after that, but make sure you don’t include the new “extras” album. For the Destination, choose the “extras” album under the subject album and select “move”. Select the subject album, choose Edit Album and set the sort order back to “default” and remove the hidden attribute.

I just got back from Israel and have about 1,200 pictures with an EST (UTC-5) timestamp that should have an IST (UTC+2) timestamp because I forgot to change my camera’s time. There’s a utility called ExifTool that can read and write the Exif (Exchangeable Image File) format embedded in the Canon Raw images with CR2 extensions. It’s available on Ubuntu in the libimage-exiftool-perl package. To change the dates, run
exiftool -AllDates+=HH:MM FILES.CR2.
In my case, my camera’s clock was 16 minutes fast and I had to shift the time ahead by seven hours, so I used
exiftool -AllDates+=6:44 *.CR2

This renamed each file to file.CR2_original and replaced the original with the updated Exif data. Unfortunately, the new file has the current modification time. I should have used the -P option. To fix this, I ran (in Bash):
for FILE in *.CR2; do touch -r ${FILE}_original ${FILE}; done

Alternately, I could have had Exiftool not rename the originals, but put the updated copies in another directory:
exiftool -P -AllDates+=6:44 -o ../from-camera-with-corrected-times *.CR2