Problem

Social Media, in this case WhatsApp, strips metadata from media (photos and videos) when user uploads it to their platform. This is unsuitable for local photo archiving and organisation that sorts media by the date.

Solution Overview

Because WhatsApp encodes the timestamp of upload on the filename, I could easily convert this into the timestamp EXIF Metadata (field DateTime, DateTimeOriginal, and DateTimeDigitized).

Technically, the upload timestamp and the EXIF timestamp metadata are two different things, but in my case, considering how we use Whatsapp, this should be a good approximation to the original timestamp.

Solution

Install Phil Harvey’s exiftool on Ubuntu 20.04:

sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl

WARNING: do this part on a fresh copy of your photos folder to play around!

This only works when filename follows YYYY:mm:dd, see ¹. WhatsApp Media file has this format: IMG-YYYYmmdd-WAXXXX.jpg.

exiftool "-alldates<filename" \
    -xmp:description="Photos obtained from WhatsApp, timestamp is upload time" \
    -Keywords+=WhatsApp -Keywords+=exiftool \
    -overwrite_original \  # to discard original files
    -r \  # recursive
    my_photos_folder

With this relatively simple command, exiftool parses the year, month, and date correctly, but it parses the XXXXX part into minute. To properly ignore this field, you have to dig deeper into the documentation and wrangle with regex. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

To Do

• Check if this applies to videos