vsbabu.org

Annotating photos with date

With Imagemagick, you can easily annotate your digital photographs with the date. This assumes that the date information is captured within the photograph - most digital cameras do this (and most common mistake I do is to remember to set the date when I insert the battery back after charging!). Here is a small shell script to do this. Save it as an executable file and then run it with all files you want to convert. The annotated files have a prefix of ts_.

#!/bin/sh
while [ "$1" ]
do
  echo "$1 -> ts_$1"
  #get timestamp
  ts=`identify -verbose $1 | \
       grep 'Exif:DateTime:'| \
       awk '{printf("%s %s", $2,$3);}'`
  #stamp it on bottom right corner
  convert $1 -gravity southeast \
        -annotate 0 "$ts" ts_$1
  shift
done


You can update the script to be more artistic by referring to examples of annotation styles.