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I managed to recover lots of images (canon cr2 + accompanying jpg) from a failing hard-drive with recurva. It created a lot of files with some sort of hash-filename. So it is a bit complicated to sort the files into their appropriate folders and/or rename them back to their original name. But all these image files still have valid exif data stored with them. So it is possible to read the correct file creation date and such.

Is there any automated method ready that could help me sort and rename them via that exif data?

steros
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  • [ExifTool](http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/) and a batch file should be able to do what you want. – DavidPostill Jan 03 '17 at 23:27
  • See [How to add missing file extensions for multiple files using ExifTool in Windows](//superuser.com/q/1132133) for inspiration – DavidPostill Jan 03 '17 at 23:30
  • I thought of somethine along the line of this (although there might be another way): - iterate over existing not lost files - for each file check the creation date - iterate over recovered files - check if the creation date of the recovered file is older than the "original" -> if so order it after the "original", if it is equal delete the recovered; I hope there is already a tool available doing this, otherwise I'll head over to main-stack to ask how to program something myself. – steros Jan 04 '17 at 08:40
  • Not really what you are looking for, but... was the drive NTFS? In that case you could have much better luck in recovering the whole directory structure (including file names) with tools like this: [Recovering broken or deleted NTFS partitions](http://askubuntu.com/a/776317/271). – Andrea Lazzarotto Jan 04 '17 at 16:16
  • See also: [How can I efficiently recover a permanently deleted folder at once?](http://superuser.com/a/1144489/278831). – Andrea Lazzarotto Jan 04 '17 at 16:17
  • thanks, no it wasn't ntfs and there wasn't even a file structure yet. Just the file names are different now. I was going to sort them into folders next if they had not been deleted. But as I'm doing that task (sorting of files by [exif] date) regularly it might be beneficial to have such tool anyways. I guess I'll look into it myself and use ExifTool + batch like @DavidPostill suggested. :) – steros Jan 04 '17 at 16:35
  • I see. To do that I usually just follow one of these links I bookmarked: https://del.icio.us/TheLazza/exif – Andrea Lazzarotto Jan 07 '17 at 00:50

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I found out that the great tool digikam is able to do this via gui. It has exiv2 included and can use it for batch rename and so much more!

steros
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