2003 - the beginnings

The idea for this little tool appeared in 2003, when I did my first students programming courses at university and discovered that my little IXUS camera set the images date to the date the image was taken. After several operating system upgrades this behaviour changed and I needed to find a way to extract the creation date from the images metadata. Therefore I needed to evaluate EXIF data extraction …

2011 - some time

During my parental leave in 2011 I decided to use this dirty little hack to evaluate the usage of google code as a project tool and to get used to my IntelliJ :-)

since 2015

The project moved over to GitHub :smile:

A lot of stuff I used before just vanished as deprecated or was removed from the JDK entirely:

• WebStart
• DEVHINT: start a deprecated, but old stable version (0.1.3-SNAPSHOT) via WebStart
• Applets

Building

This tool can be used with Maven in two ways:

• run as a standalone application

$ ./run.sh 
OR
$ ./mvnw clean install -Plive-demo

• run the executable GUI FatJAR (includes runtime dependencies)

$ ./mvnw clean install
$ java -jar target/fotorenamer-4.0.0-SNAPSHOT-executable.jar

Running with JBang

Install JBang and build and install the current snapshot into your local Maven repository once (on Windows use mvnw.cmd):

./mvnw clean install
jbang run --fresh fotorenamer@jbang-catalog.json

The catalog launches the existing Swing GUI, not a command-line renamer. A graphical desktop session is required. JBang selects Java 17 or newer and can download a suitable JDK if needed; the Maven build itself also requires a suitable JDK.

Alternatively, run the launcher directly:

jbang run --fresh jbang/FotoRenamer.java

To make the command available outside the checkout:

jbang app install --name fotorenamer jbang/FotoRenamer.java
fotorenamer

The launcher uses de.aikiit:fotorenamer:4.0.0-SNAPSHOT:executable from your local Maven repository. It does not currently download a published FotoRenamer release; keep the version in jbang/FotoRenamer.java in sync with pom.xml. After changing application code, repeat ./mvnw clean install and use jbang run --fresh to avoid reusing cached snapshot dependencies. Reinstall an installed command with jbang app install --force --fresh --name fotorenamer jbang/FotoRenamer.java.

JVM properties can be passed before the alias, for example to select English:

jbang run -Duser.language=en -Duser.country=US fotorenamer@jbang-catalog.json

Running from the command line

The headless console runner uses picocli and the same image processing as the GUI (issue #15). Java 17 or newer is required; no graphical desktop is needed. Back up your images before running it.

Build the additional CLI FatJAR, including its runtime dependencies:

./mvnw clean verify -Pcli

This also runs headless integration tests against the packaged CLI. The usual fotorenamer-4.0.0-SNAPSHOT-executable.jar still launches the GUI; the additional fotorenamer-4.0.0-SNAPSHOT-cli.jar launches only the console runner, without a splashscreen. ./mvnw clean package -Pcli builds both JARs without running the packaged-JAR integration tests.

# Add the EXIF capture timestamp to image filenames
java -jar target/fotorenamer-4.0.0-SNAPSHOT-cli.jar /home/myphotos

# Remove one leading timestamp prefix (also accepts --reverse)
java -jar target/fotorenamer-4.0.0-SNAPSHOT-cli.jar -r /home/myphotos

# Show help or the application version without processing files
java -jar target/fotorenamer-4.0.0-SNAPSHOT-cli.jar --help
java -jar target/fotorenamer-4.0.0-SNAPSHOT-cli.jar --version

Quote directory paths containing spaces. Only images directly in the selected directory are processed, not subdirectories. Reverse mode removes one prefix in yyyyMMdd_HHmmss_ or the legacy yyyyMMdd_HHmm_ format; it does not check the EXIF date. The console summary reports processed, renamed, skipped, and failed counts. Existing target files are never overwritten, and individual processing failures do not stop the remaining files.

Exit codes for scripts:

The JBang launcher above remains a GUI launcher, not a CLI alias. Use the CLI FatJAR for console or server environments, optionally with -Djava.awt.headless=true before -jar.

Running

1. Create a backup of your images.
2. Start this tool.
3. Select your image directory.
4. Hit ‘Umbenennen’ (Rename) to get your files renamed automatically.
5. Done :-)

$ mvn -Plive-demo -Duser.language=en -Duser.country=US

Splashscreen image credit

The GUI splashscreen uses the photograph “Vintage Canon film camera hanging against a sunlit white wall” by Marlon Medau from Unsplash, used under the Unsplash License. The bundled copy at src/main/resources/image/splash-camera.jpg is resized to 400 × 600 pixels without cropping. This photograph is licensed separately from the project's Apache License 2.0 source code. It is included in the application, so displaying the splashscreen does not require an internet connection. The CLI does not show a splashscreen.

Developer Documentation

The project is built with Maven. The project site contains this introduction and usage guide as well as the generated project reports.

Generate the site locally with:

./mvnw site

Open target/site/index.html to view it. The pre-site phase copies this README to the generated site sources as the homepage, so GUI FatJAR, JBang, and CLI instructions are maintained in one place. Use the site lifecycle rather than calling site:site directly, which skips that preparation. Run ./mvnw clean verify -Pcli first if you also want current test and coverage results included in the reports.