I take a lot of photographs. Thousands per year. I’ve been keeping them on DVD and on hard drives for years, but recently I noticed an odd thing – the “date created” and “date modified” reported in Finder have been wrong. Not just a little wrong, like a day or two off, but upwards of four years off, sometimes with no logical correlation to the original shoot date. I’ve pulled some images into Windows Explorer to see if it’d report proper “creation” dates, but it did not.

This creates a problem for me because I like to keep images sorted by date. And unfortunately, my file naming practices have changed over the years. I used to name files by event, like “Dallas BBQ – IMG 0001.JPG”. Useless for sorting by date. At one point, I added the date into the file name, but at the end. Also useless. Then I stopped renaming and left the file as named by the camera, like “IMG_7538.JPG”. That’s great, but when I upgrade cameras, the file names often start over at IMG_0001, and I certainly don’t want my new images to replace my existing files! Imagine 35,000 photos with inconsistent file names, then imagine them with incorrect file data. When the file info is screwy, the sorting and organizing becomes a hellish nightmare. Not even iPhoto can organize things properly.

Allow me to introduce the little application that saved my sanity – ExifRenamer. It’s a simple app – terribly simple – but it solved all my image renaming problems in a matter of seconds. ExifRenamer looks at the Exif data stored in your digital photos (date shot, for example) and renames the files based on that Exif data. In my case, I wanted ExifRenamer to add the exact shoot date as a file name prefix, then use the existing file name as a suffix. So “IMG_8399.JPG” instantly becomes “20071108 14-21-06 – IMG_8399.JPG” with down-to-the-second accuracy.

Check out this little video clip wherein I run some of my images through ExifRenamer. You’ll see how fast it works, but pay particular attention to the “Date Modified” column. Finder says these images were Created On and Modified On December 4, 2007. Bull-honkey. Check the proper output from ExifRenamer. 2003, 2004 and 200-frikin-5!

The best part about ExifRenamer… it’s free. Check versiontracker.com for the most up-to-date download.