Photo Naminator 4+

Photo Naminator is a 3rd-party utility for Apple macOS that takes photo and video files as input (like JPEG, PNG, GIF or RAW format files) and renames their filenames based on metadata associated with those photos, like the date and time, or location or with what type of lense a photo was taken. Create sub-folders on-the-fly while renaming photo files to sort photo files into directories based on any of those metadata properties, e.g. one folder for each year and month, or city and country. Filter identical photo files (duplicates) during the process to ensure there's only one copy of each photo file afterwards. Photo Naminator also handles so-called sidecar files (e.g. XMP) correctly during the renaming process by keeping their names in sync with the respective photo file.

The metadata considered for each file is the corresponding EXIF, TIFF, PNG or camera manufacturer related data that a digital camera or smartphone stores with each photo taken. This includes information about when or where the photo was taken, what camera settings where used, etc.

Photo Naminator allows you to use any of those metadata attributes to dynamically construct a new file name for each input photo file.

Using the MapQuest Geolocation API, Photo Naminator can automatically determine address information like street, city, state and country of nearby landmarks based on your photo's GPS location information. A valid MapQuest API key is required, but can be easily obtained by registering with MapQuest for a free-of-charge API key (good for 15.000 lookups).

A typical use-cases for Photo Naminator is naming all files of a directory based on the date and time they were taken, so you can easily sort them chronologically. But there are many additional data points captured with a photo and stored in its associated EXIF or other metadata, like camera or lense used, the location where the photo was taken, dimensions in pixels, etc...  

So-called sidecar files like XMP metadata files which are associated with photo files by sharing the same base-filename, but a different file extension (e.g. XMP) will be automatically detected when analysing the input photo files. When the photo file then gets renamed, the associated sidecar files will be renamed and moved/copied accordingly, ensuring that both files stay in sync.

By the way, Photo Naminator can also change the creation and modification times of the actual file itself to match the data and time the photo was taken.

If you want to get rid of sensitive metadata, like timestamps or GPS location of a photo, use the author's Photo Anonymizator app (also available on the Apple App Store) for bulk-removal of sensitive EXIF metadata without re-encoding the actual images.