Computers Programming

Set the Date of VX8300 & enV Touch Photos from Filename

by Zach

Before I continue explaining what this is for: If you know exactly what this utility does and you’d like a download link to the Python script, here it is:
LG_Photos_Filename_To_Date.zip

Introduction

A long time ago, I used an LG VX8300 flip phone. I still maintain it’s the best flip phone I’ve ever used. After that, I used an LG enV Touch, which was also an excellent device.

Both of these phones took perfectly fine images and videos, which I still have on my hard drive years later. The problem is, as I’ve modified my PC’s hard drive setup and touched the files with various utilities, the file’s time attributes have become incorrect. Here’s an example of the file attributes from a photo I took in early 2009:

Old Photo

As you can see, the date created, date modified, and date accessed file attributes are all incorrect. I wrote a Python script for Windows machines to modify these values based upon the file’s name.

Older LG phones take photos and videos whose filename have the following pattern:

<month><day><year without century><hour, in 24-hour time><minute>.<file extension>

For example, the file above (which has filename “0119090103.jpg”) was taken on January 19th, 2009 at 1:03 AM.

The Script

Here’s a download link to the script I wrote. It only works on Windows. To use it, unzip it and then double click it. You must have Python and Pywin32 installed. Next, supply the directory where your images are located and press enter. Don’t put quotes around the directory.

The features of this script include:

  • Operates on .jpg, .3gp, and .3g2 files
  • Only operates on files that start with the 10-digit date format used by LG’s pre-smartphone devices
  • Changes the date created, date modified, and date accessed file attributes to the time from the filename

Known bug: This script has issues with daylight savings time. You might notice that your “Date Created” attribute gets changed to a value that’s one hour before the correct time. I’ll work on that at some point, but it’s not a critical bug.

Here’s a screenshot of the file properties of the same file as above, taken after running this script:

After

Please be careful when using this script! It modifies attributes of files on your system. I’ve used this script on my own filesystem without any issues, but I make no guarantees that it’ll work with yours. Feel free to modify the script as you see fit.t

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