Batch Rename Images with their EXIF Data

While I work on an educational photography tool, I encountered a specific problem where the solution is worth sharing.

My problem was loading images by their exposure setting metadata. Instead of creating a database of images and settings, it seems much easier to just rename the files with some encoding scheme.

So that’s what I did. This python script will take a folder and a ‘pattern’, and rename all image files in that folder with the pattern.

Using it, I was able to turn my folder of images from my camera into files usable for my learning tools.

How the Python Script Works

Here are the core problem-solving parts of the script.

• argparse is the [not so] secret sauce for dealing with command line arguments.
• OS.listdir allows me to iterate through all of the files in a folder.
• OS.path.splitext is the preffered way to split out the extension from a filename.
• The Python EXIF package pulls the exposure data from the image metadata, and implicitly works to filter out non-image files.
• The Fraction library helps me deal with shutter speeds; ie: grab the denominator from fractions.
• And, of course, OS.rename to actually rename a file.

The script & documentation are available here: hunterdyar/image-exif-batch-renamer