How to organize more and more digital pictures and videos is a good question. One option is to use command line tool jhead.
Script like this will rename images and movie files. AVI files are renamed according to the EXIF information in thumnail files *.THM. These files are downloaded by software utility enclosed on Cannon CD.
jhead -a -n%%y%%m%%dv%%H%%M%%S -ci ..\jhead-exif-comment.txt MVI*.THM
jhead -n%%y%%m%%d_%%H%%M%%S -ci ..\jhead-exif-comment.txt IMG*.JPG
Example:
MVI_0214.THM --> 100125v100457.jpg
MVI_0214.AVI --> 100125v100457.AVI
IMG_0207.JPG --> 100125_093042.jpg
IMG_0208.JPG --> 100125_093101.jpg
Letter “v” in the middle of the video related filenames THM/JPG and AVI means “video”. In script example above, file jhead-exif-comment.txt has comment, which will be add to the EXIF information. It can have following structure, pipe character separated, one line:
v |codepage|author|location [ll=coordinates]|keywords|text description
v1|UTF-8|(c)Joe Doe|Anchorage|snow|A lot of snow
Explanation:
v … data version. It allows easier change format structure in future
codepage … Character encoding, default UTF-8
author … author of the picture or movie
place … location of the picture. ll= designates coordinates, e.g. from maps.google.com
keywords … descriptive keywords, comma separated
description … text description till end of line