How can I rename filename with modified date and number count with Exiftool? (Mac)

Question

Trying to switch to Exiftool from jhead to rename more filetypes other than jpg & jpeg.

Whats the script for exiftool to convert from jhead:

jhead -n"%Y_%m_%d-newname-%04i" *.jpg

output: 2019_10_05-newname-0001.jpg

*.jpg as multiple files

Answer 1

Jhead's -n option appears to read the DateTimeOriginal tag for the timestamp so you would be doing a tag copy from DateTimeOriginal to Filename. You would use the -d (dateFormat) option to format the timestamp to your pattern and exiftool uses about the same format as JHead (see here for exiftool date formatting variables).

Exiftool has the FileSequence tag that will holds the file count. In order to pad that out to four places, you have to use the Advanced formatting feature and a bit of perl code.

The end result would be something like this:
Windows: exiftool -d "%Y_%m_%d" "-Filename<${DateTimeOriginal}-newname-${FileSequence;$_=sprintf('%04d', $_ )}.%e" <FilesOrDirs>

Mac/Linux: exiftool -d '%Y_%m_%d' '-Filename<${DateTimeOriginal}-newname-${FileSequence;$_=sprintf("%04d", $_ )}.%e' <FilesOrDirs>

Replace Filename with Testname to test the command without actually renaming any files. Swap single/double quotes if running Mac/Linux to avoid bash interpreting parts of the command as variables. Add -r (recurse) option to recurse into subdirectories.