exiftool: One small gimmick

I have a list of tools that are veritable Swiss Army knives — things that can do so much that I could probably dedicate an entire week on how to use them.

On the other hand, they don’t have much of an interface, which makes them only vaguely interesting to me as console applications.

But they’re great things to have on hand. Today I’ve got exiftool to show, which is really clever if you lean toward obsessive-compulsiveness, like I do.

Let me explain. I like personal photos and wallpaper and so forth — lists of image files — to show their dimensions in their file name. I.e.,

wp-cutesy-landscape-1920x1200.jpg

Maybe I’m not alone on that. But without some way of pulling the dimension information from the file and appending it to the name, it becomes a hideous chore.

exiftool can do this in one fell swoop, like this:

exiftool -ext 'jpg' '-filename<%f_${ImageSize}.${FileType}' .

One command, and the entire folder gets manhandled in seconds. Change the extension as you like, or just use a splat to attack everything.

The downside, if you can call it that, is there’s nothing to show while exiftool does its thing. There’s no interface, no navigation boxes, no confirmation or onscreen help.

It just does what it’s told, and shuts up. Which is an admirable trait, I suppose. … 😐

P.S.: Bonus! Latest update only days ago! 😀