Quick tip: Merging photos from two different cameras

This time when we went to Pondicherry on the year end, we took two cameras - I took my Rebel XTi and my wife the LX3. While uploading our photos to Flickr, we had a problem. We wanted to merge our photo sets, but because of the different photo naming conventions of the two cameras, the photos won’t be sorted according to time taken. The solution, as I found out after a bit of digging and trying out different exif tools, was simple enough. Install jhead and run:

jhead -n%Y%m%d-%H%M%S -ft *.JPG

This would rename all the photos dumped in the current directory using the YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS format. And even if some app you have doesn’t sort by the file name, this command would change the modification time of all the photos to the time the photo was taken.

And yes, it is a good idea of using this time format and not the default MMDD-HHSS format, else trips on the year end (like ours, this time) would get messed up while sorting.