filter out photos with different exif date on Mac

I'm looking for a way on macOS to filter out photos which creation date doesn't match the exif photo date. What is the best tool for doing this?

Solution

I am no expert with exiftool but think I have got something that is 90% of what you want. I am writing it up step-by-step so that:

you can adapt it if it's not exactly what you meant, and
so I can remember what I did in future :-)

So the first thing is to use exiftool to get all things related to the date:

exiftool image.jpg | grep -i date

File Modification Date/Time     : 2021:01:14 10:51:38+00:00
File Access Date/Time           : 2021:01:14 10:51:40+00:00
File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2021:01:14 10:51:38+00:00
Modify Date                     : 2013:03:09 08:59:50
Date/Time Original              : 2013:03:09 08:59:50
Create Date                     : 2013:03:09 08:59:50

That looks useful, but internally exiftool uses Perl variables for the fields/tags, and I would like to get the variable names so I can compare them later, so I added -s:

exiftool -s image.jpg | grep -i date

FileModifyDate                  : 2021:01:14 10:51:38+00:00
FileAccessDate                  : 2021:01:14 10:51:40+00:00
FileInodeChangeDate             : 2021:01:14 10:51:38+00:00
ModifyDate                      : 2013:03:09 08:59:50
DateTimeOriginal                : 2013:03:09 08:59:50
CreateDate                      : 2013:03:09 08:59:50

Ok, I think you want FileModifyDate and DateTimeOriginal, so let's check we can print them:

exiftool -p '$Filename, $FileModifyDate, $DateTimeOriginal'  image.jpg

image.jpg, 2021:01:14 10:51:38+00:00, 2013:03:09 08:59:50

Note you MUST use single quotes on macOS/Linux else the bash shell tries to expand the variable and it expands to nothing - unless you happen to have a bash variable called DateTimeOriginal. I guess you would have to use double quotes on Windows because it doesn't generally understand single quotes.

That's good, but you aren't interested in the hours, minutes and seconds, so we can change the way exiftool considers dates to only look at the year, month and day with -d:

exiftool -d %F -p '$Filename, $FileModifyDate, $DateTimeOriginal'  image.jpg 

image.jpg, 2021-01-14, 2013-03-09

Now we want to check whether they are the same (for all JPEG files) with an if statement and only print "unhappy" files:

exiftool -d %F -if '$FileModifyDate !~ $DateTimeOriginal' -p '$FileName' *.jpg

image.jpg
iphone.jpg
2 files failed condition

If you are vaguely uneasy with Perl string comparisons like that, you could do the tests and printing with awk like this:

exiftool -d %F -p '$Filename, $FileModifyDate, $DateTimeOriginal' *.jpg | awk -F, '$2 != $3{print $1}'

Note the above only executes a single exiftool process. I think you probably want to avoid running a whole new process for exiftool with every file, so do NOT do this:

find ... -iname "*.jpg" -exec exiftool ... {} \;

I think you can recurse into subdirectories with -r but I haven't tried that.

By the way, on macOS you can install exiftool most simply with homebrew:

brew install exiftool

Keywords: exiftool, creation date. modification date, EXIF date, matching, non-matching, photo, photos, prime.