Restoring from backups with F-Spot

A Tech article with View Comments posted 17 March 2007.
Tags: backup, fspot

I recently had to restore from backups on my laptop, and fortunately all of my pictures were backed up. When I went to import them into F-Spot, I noticed (to my dismay) that the dates on at least a third of the pictures were set to the current date instead of the date they were taken. No EXIF data?! Aghast, I set off in search of a solution.

F-Spot stores your photos in a %YYYY/%MM/%DD directory structure, which makes things easy. I wrote picture-toucher.pl, a perl script that uses File::Touch and DateTime to change the modification time on every picture file.

All of those files now have “noon” as their modification time, but it’s better than nothing. Because F-Spot uses the EXIF data when it’s available, nothing changes for files that have EXIF data.

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