Help needed - script for retrieving "date photo taken"

[aikipy]

Hello, guys!

I need some help. Since I have thousands of pictures taken in the last few years and I want to sort them, I want to do this thing, in order to have the pictures in the right order. I want to write a little script that rename the picture using the date(and time) it was taken. I have some pictures, from a few years ago, and I don't even know if there are duplicates or not, because there are too many. I could use a program that finds duplicates, but I would really like to do this script. What I don't know is how to take and put in a variable the data I need. I found some coding lines for Windows, but I need it for Linux.

Thanx!

[GNU-Fan]

What does date mean here? Is it the timestamp of the file or is it some entry in the picture's header?

[aikipy]

It refers to the timestamp that is stored in the metadata of the picture (for instance, in Suse 11.1, if I right-click a photo and I hit "Properties", in the "Image" tab there is all sort of information, like image type, width, height, exposure time and there is also the date the picture was taken - that's the one I need).

Thanks!

[GNU-Fan]

In that case you should poke around at
ImageMagick: Convert, Edit, and Compose Images

They have many tools for extracting information out of images, very feasible for scripting.

[aikipy]

Thank you very much!