Tag: metadata

Adding the date to Sony Mavica FD-91 images

20 years ago, this was one state-of-the-art brick:

Sony Mavica FD-91: a camera with a floppy drive, or a Sovet brutalist monument? Discuss (briefly)

The only way to get pictures from it is via the floppy disk drive on the side. Then you’ve got a bunch of images with 8.3 filenames and the only metadata being the date saved from the camera’s clock. I’d written about it before, but I had an event that I wanted to record with a suitable camera, so adding some metadata to the pictures became important.

#!/bin/bash
# mavicafix - add some basic exif info to MVC-FD91 images
# scruss - 2019-12

jhead -mkexif  "$@"
jhead -ta+5:00 "$@"
exiftool -Make='Sony' -Model='MVC-FD91' -Orientation=1 -n "$@"
jhead -ft "$@"
rename '$_=lc($_);' "$@"

What it does:

  1. uses jhead to add a minimal EXIF header containing the file modification time
  2. corrects that time (I think the Mavica expects it in UTC) to my local time
  3. adds basic make/model/which-way-up data using exiftool
  4. Corrects the file modification time back to the stored EXIF value
  5. renames the files to all lower case.