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I need to set the exif date tag of a bunch of photos stored with the following hierarchy: YEAR/MONTH/DAY/IMG_something.JPG

How could I do it easily with exiftool?

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Basically, the command would be something like this
ExifTool "-TAG<Directory" <DIR or FILE>
assuming that the directory structure is numeric e.g. 2015/07/04
But there may be problems depending upon the exact tag you want to use. Many date/time tags require a time as well as a date and I believe all the EXIF date/time tags fall into this category. If you don't care about the actual time, you could -TAG<$Directory 00:00:00. Or if you want to increment the time, you can see this previous post for some help.

XMP tags are usually more flexible and can be used without a time.

If there is already a current time in the tag and you just want to change the date, you can use something like this
ExifTool "-DateTimeOriginal<$Directory ${DateTimeOriginal;s/.* //" <DIR or FILE>

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    \$\begingroup\$ It doesn't seem to work. I tried: exiftool "-CreateDate<Directory 00:00:00" -r ./ and got errors like: Warning: No writable tags set from ./2015/03/03/IMG_3472.JPG Maybe it has to do with the fact that the Directory tag starts with a ./ ? \$\endgroup\$
    – wilk
    Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 13:04
  • \$\begingroup\$ Two things to try, mistakes on my part. If you're running on linux/mac, change the double quotes to single quotes. Also, I forgot to add a dollar sign to the assignment because of mixing tag and text. So try this exiftool '-CreateDate<$Directory 00:00:00' -r ./ The ./ should not be a problem at all. The program's author uses similar examples all the time and I just tested it on my Windows computer and it worked fine. \$\endgroup\$
    – StarGeek
    Commented Aug 7, 2015 at 17:24

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