Searching for pictures taken on a certain date with ImageMagick

It's always a joy to fiddle with the command line. Past the first hundreds attempts, data eventually starts streaming through and if you save it somewhere you're sorted for life (hence this post).

This small command I found for my girlfriend who was searching through a maze of folders for pictures of a certain date (which ended up being in the trash —don't ask me).

The below is a lot easier than double-clicking your whole hard-drive, so here it goes:

find . \
  -type f \
  -name "*.JPG" \
  -exec \
    identify -format '%[exif:DateTimeOriginal] %i\n' '{}' \; \
| grep "2018:06:02";

find . searches in the current directory, for regular files (-f) matching a name ending in .JPG although feel free to amend this filter or remove it altogether. The subsequent command expects image files so make sure that's what you get out of your search.

exec passes each file (the '{}' bit) to identify which is one of the many utilities provided by ImageMagick. It fetches data from the picture and outputs information about it. Here I'm customising the output format to be just the date (%[exif:DateTimeOriginal]) and the full filename (%i). n As this point (before the last pipe) our output looks like this:

2018:05:07 20:49:16 ./DCIM/105_PANA/P1050224.JPG
2018:05:07 09:42:03 ./DCIM/105_PANA/P1050212.JPG
2018:06:02 13:43:26 ./DCIM/105_PANA/P1050265.JPG
2018:06:02 13:15:23 ./DCIM/105_PANA/P1050262.JPG
2018:05:06 11:17:39 ./DCIM/105_PANA/P1050174.JPG
2018:06:04 18:24:53 ./DCIM/105_PANA/P1050302.JPG

Pipe this to grep and you're sorted.

PS: and now what? well if you wanted to copy them all to some directory you could go like this:

find . \
  -type f \
  -name "*.JPG" \
  -exec \
    identify -format '%[exif:DateTimeOriginal] %i\n' '{}' \; \
| grep "2018:06:02" \
| awk '{ print $3 }' \
| xargs cp -t /tmp/photos-results

Here we've added two lines, the first one to filter out the 3rd column of the output (awk has an inherent understanding of the n-th column $n), and the last one to turn all of these lines into a concatenated, space-separated list of files that is fed to cp with the destination folder specified through an explicit switch, since it allows us to use the form cp -t DEST SOURCE1, SOURCE2, ... rather than the usual cp SOURCE DEST which wouldn't work here.

By the time I'd figured it all out my girlfriend has long found her pictures but as always, there is an XKCD comic for that.