I just started using a photo manager (yeah, I know), and I realized my EXIF data was all jacked up. The file dates are (usually) right, but a lot of the extra data had been stripped out.
I have thousands of old digital photos; no way in hell am I manually organizing those into dates/events.
Luckily, there’s a cross-platform tool that does a great job with it. It’s called EXIFTool. The website has instructions for installation with Windows/OSX/Linux – and there’s standalone binaries for Win/OSX.
This guy’s solution is what I essentially ended up going with. It’s important to have at least the first and last lines:
exiftool -v "-FileModifyDate>DateTimeOriginal" *
and
exiftool -v "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" *
The first changes the EXIF metadata to reflect the “last modified” date. The second changes the file date to the EXIF “Taken On” date. Wonderful!
Also – at least on linux – it recursively searches directories, so no need for getting funky. Just run and go. Backups are made in the directories of each file.
You could avoid the need for the second command by adding a -P option to the first command to preserve the original FileModifyDate of the images.