Since Google Photos stopped being free I switched over to Amazon Photos to backup the pictures on my phone. One thing I noticed is sometimes when I would edit a photo on my pc and upload it to Amazon Photos the picture would seemingly disappear. Upon investigation I found that the photos has not actually disappeared they just ended up in a “No Date” purgatory section of Amazon Photos. Turns out that if the exif tags are not set exactly right, Amazon Photos just gives up and decides it has not date rather than use the last modified date like Google Photos does.
The exif tag that Amazon Photos uses for dates is datetimeoriginal. Turns out exiftool can fix this pretty easily. The following one-liner finds all jpegs that do not have datetimeoriginal set and sets it to be the file modified date. The dot runs it for all files in the current directory and -r makes it recursive to sub-directories:
exiftool -r '-datetimeoriginal<filemodifydate' -if '(not $datetimeoriginal or ($datetimeoriginal eq "0000:00:00 00:00:00")) and ($filetype eq "JPEG")' .
Enjoy!
scriptorlog 