Bit of a long shot, this one. Primarily because I'm wondering if I can use Yate for a non-music related problem. Not that I think it's particularly complicated in that I've used Yate to change image names, etc. but... Well, let's see.

I have a digital camera & I can use Adobe Bridge to export the photographs from the camera to my computer.

Unfortunately, Bridge seems to have quite a limited range of options in its Photo Importer interface, to the extent that I can get the basic information more or less how I want it, but then I have to do multiple "find & replace" type actions, to perfect the file names.

So, I start off with a file name like this:

20240710102744IMG_1510.crt

And I want it to end up like this:

2024-07-10 10.27.44 - IMG_1510.crt

(In case it's not obvious, the first part is the year, month & day (hyphenated). Then follows the time in hour, minutes & seconds (separated by full points). Finally, after a "space hyphen space", there's the original image name which is assigned by the camera & which I'd like to keep "as is". (I often shoot in bursts where all the photos happen in the same second & it's only the unique image number that's different.)

Assuming the starting format was always the same, so that the hyphens etc. would always be inserted into the same places, would it be possible to create an action where I can select a folder with a ton of files in with the same name format in it, run the action & have the action add the two hyphens, the space, the two full points & the "space hyphen space" into the appropriate places, given that every time one is added, the character count for where the next one is increases?

Here's a screenshot showing part of a list of photos:

I suspect the cr2 to crt was an autocorrect I didn't spot. (In fact it tried to change it to cut just then!)

Thanks so much, I'll check it out now.

So, this Action seems to have developed a fault (which usually means I'm doing something stupid).

I've got Yate onto a second machine successfully & I'm pretty sure I've used this Action a couple of times without issue. (Of course, now I'm starting to doubt myself on that!)

However, this morning, I exported a disc full of photos from the camera & they came in with the usual file name. I ran the action & it seems to have changed the day on all the files to the 7th.

I exported the images a second time, assuming I did something wrong & got the same result.

At the third time of asking, I duplicated the folder of photos (A & B in the screenshot) & ran the action again.

As you can see from the first screenshot, with A (the raw import) at the top & B (the actioned images) below it, the highlighted image has kept the correct time stamp but the date has been changed to the 7th on all the images. (They actually run from the 11th to the 17th.)

The second screenshot is from Bridge where you can see the file name does not correspond to the date stamp in the metadata below it.

Any thoughts?

Oops. Evidently I like months so much that I decided to get rid of the days 🙂

In the image each $ sequence represents a regexp match. I entered $2 twice using $1-$2-$2 as opposed to $1-$2-$3 on line 15

https://2manyrobots.com/actions/Rename-Photos2.zip

Sorry 🙁

Oh, cool! Thanks, I'll get that installed.