If you own a digital camera, you’re probably generating lots of photos and videos with uninformative filenames like “IMG\_0002.JPG” and “MVI\_0003.AVI“. It’s not easy to view these files chronologically, especially if you mix photos and videos or files from different cameras.
If you’re on Windows, a freeware program called Stamp extracts the date/time each photo was originally shot from camera-generated metadata (e.g.: EXIF), then adds a timestamp to the beginning of each filename. After running Stamp, you can sort your photos and videos by filename to view them in true chronological order – even if they come from different cameras. E.g.:
IMG_0002.JPG --> 2003-12-25 @09-01-24 IMG_0002.JPG IMG_0004.JPG --> 2003-12-25 @10-23-48 IMG_0004.JPG MVI_0001.AVI --> 2003-12-25 @08-58-17 MVI_0001.AVI MVI_0003.AVI --> 2003-12-25 @09-06-35 MVI_0003.AVI
If you don’t use Windows or if you prefer a simple utility with a command-line interface, take a look at the open-source program jhead.