Tekapo is a wizard style application that will help you manage your digital photos. Most digital cameras will store images as JPEG files. Information about the camera and how the camera has taken the photo is placed into the JPEG file along with the image data. One of the pieces of information stored is the date and time that the photo was taken. Tekapo uses the picture taken date to organise the photos.
I came across two main problems with my constantly increasing collection of digital photos. Firstly and most commonly, I want every photo I take to be stored in a sensible folder structure. I prefer my photos to be stored in year and month folders for some kind of logical separation. For any set of photos stored in the same folder, I wanted them to appear in chronological order when the files are ordered alphabetically. Secondly, each time I travel overseas or at least across different time zones, there are usually a couple of days of photos that are taken at my home time zone. I want my photos to store the picture taken date with the local time.
Tekapo deals with these two problems by allowing you to either rename photos based on the picture taken date or shift the picture taken date.
Step 1
When Tekapo starts, you will be shown the first of four steps. In the first step, you need to select the task that you want to do. You may either rename photos, or shift their picture taken date. Select the required task and click Next.
Step 2
In the second step, you may search for files to process. If searching for files is not what you require, you may click Skip and manually select files in Step 3.
In order to run a search, you need to enter a path to search or click the browse button on the right of the path textbox.
If the Search subfolders checkbox is checked, any subfolders found in the specified search path will also be searched as well as all their subfolders.
For the more technically minded people, you may also specify a regular expression against the search results. To enable regular expression file searching, check the Use regular expression checkbox and enter your expression into the Regular expression textbox. The radio buttons specify whether the full file path or just the file name of each search result is tested against the expression. Where a file path or name matches the expression, it will be included in the search results.
All the settings on this step are retained for the next time Tekapo is run.
A valid search path must be entered and if a regular expression is specified, it must be a valid expression.
Clicking Next will run the search. Once the search is completed, Step 3 will be displayed with the search results.
Example:
These are the search criteria that I use. When I insert my memory card, it appears as drive F (removable drive). My camera (a Nikon D50) stores the photos in the DCIM\100NCD50 path. Because I want to avoid any unnecessary searching, I set Tekapo to only search under this path. I also search subfolders and test against a regular expression. My expression tests that the beginning of the file name found starts with "DSC_". The reason for using the regular expression is that sometimes I don't use the memory card. In this case, I may have already copied the original photos to my storage folder. These settings will ensure that files that have already been renamed will be skipped.
Step 3
In the third step, any files found from the search in Step 2 will be displayed. You may add new items by clicking the Add button. Clicking the Remove button will remove the selected items from the list. Clicking the Remove All button will remove all items from the list.
Clicking Next will display Step 4. There must be at least one item in the list before you may continue.
Step 4 - Renaming photos
In the forth step for the rename task, the file name format needs to be specified.
The file name format will substitute values of the picture taken date found in each file specified in Step 3. The set of format values that can be specified are:
<d>Numeric day value without a leading zero
<dd>Numeric day value with a leading zero
<ddd>Abbreviated day name
<dddd>Full day name
<M>Numeric month value without a leading zero
<MM>Numeric month value with a leading zero
<MMM>Abbreviated month name
<MMMM>Full month name
<y>Single digit year value
<yy>Double digit year value
<yyyy>Four digit year value
<h>12 hour value without a leading zero
<hh>12 hour value with a leading zero
<H>24 hour value without a leading zero
<HH>24 hour value with a leading zero
<m>Minute value without a leading zero
<mm>Minute value with a leading zero
<s>Second value without a leading zero
<ss>Second value with a leading zero
<t>First character of an AM/PM value
<tt>AM/PM value
<z>Displays the time zone offset in whole hours without a leading zero
<zz>Displays the time zone offset in whole hours with a leading zero
<zzz>Displays the time zone offset in hours and minutes
Clicking Finish will process the files.
The file name format in the screenshot above is an example of how Tekapo satisfies my first problem. If files are renamed as YearMonthDay-HourMinutesSeconds.jpg, then when the files are sorted alphabetically, they will also appear in chronological order. The format seen here is the default for Tekapo. Any changes to this value are retained for the next time Tekapo is run.
If the file name format doesn't specify the file extension, the file extension of the original file will be used.
The file name format specified can either be relative to the current location of the files or can be an absolute (full) path. In the screenshot above, there is no indication of drive or folder path so the files will be renamed using the format specified and placed in the same folder (relative naming). The following screenshot shows an example of an absolute file name format.
These are the settings that I normally use. I like my photos to be organised under a My Photos folder on D drive. Each photo is (at the least) placed in a Year\Month folder hierarchy. If I have a batch of photos that are about a specific event, I tend to modify the file name format so that there is a hard-coded folder name before the file name (eg: using a naming format of "D:\My Photos\<yyyy>\<MMMM>\Some event\<yyyy><MM><dd>-<HH><mm><ss>").
If the format value specified is invalid, the example provided will indicate this.
The format value should have at least one format value although not having enough format values may result in file names that already exist. Where file names already exist, Tekapo will add a -xx suffix where xx is an incrementing number to ensure unique file names. For example if TestImage<yyyy> was the format and TestImage2006.jpg already existed and two more photos from 2006 were processed, the two new files would be renamed as TestImage2006-01.jpg and TestImage2006-02.jpg.
Even with the format that I use, multi-shot sequences can easily be done within a second. Because Tekapo ensures that unique names are used, these sequences are retained instead of being overwritten until there is only one file left.
Note: While this suffix naming ensures uniqueness, it can't ensure that sub-second sequences will be renamed in chronological order within that second. The reason for this is that the picture taken date stored in the JPEG files doesn't store millisecond information. Usually this shouldn't be a problem because Tekapo should still read the files in alphabetical order and each camera should produce default file names that will sort chronologically when sorted alphabetically. The file name format I use simply converts the unusable names produced by the camera (such as DSC_001, DSC_002, DSC_003 etc) into something more useful.
Step 4 - Shifting picture taken date
In the forth step for the shift picture taken task, the time shift values need to be specified.
The values will be used to shift the picture taken date found in each file specified in Step 3. Each of these values can be in the range -100 to 100 inclusive. Typically, this will be used to shift the hours forwards or backwards to cater for different time zones.
Clicking Finish will process the files.
Completed wizard:
When Finish is clicked on the fourth step, the selected files are either renamed or have their picture taken dates shifted. Tekapo will display the processing progress. When processing is completed, a Details button is available.
There may be scenarios where Tekapo has not been able to successfully process all the files. This will be indicated with an error icon being displayed next to the Details button when processing is finished.
Clicking the Details button will display all the actions taken by Tekapo. The details may contain successful and/or failure records.