Renaming Files with Automator - How To Get YYYYMMDD Format?

When you launch Automator and it throws a File Chooser, just click New Document with the Desktop as the location and choose Application.

The first two actions in my example above came from the File & Folders Library. Just drag and drop them in the order shown on the larger workflow panel. The final action (Run Shell Script) came from the Utilities Library.

In the Run Shell Script action, if the Shell is not /bin/zsh, select that. and change Pass input to as arguments. That ensures that the files from the preceding Get Folder Contents will be fed into the Run Shell Script action. Select and remove all of the default code that appears in the Run Shell Script window. Then paste the following:

: <<"COMMENT"
Rename each file so that it is prefaced by its creation date/time. Foo.ext becomes YYYY-mm-dd_HHMMSS_foo.ext.
The rename occurs in the same folder location. The "${@}" is all of the files passed into this action.
The '#' character is a comment symbol in the Shell.
COMMENT

for f in "$@"
do
    # assign YYYY-mm-dd_HHMMSS_ as creation date (%SB) to cdatetime
	cdatetime=$(/usr/bin/stat -t '%F_%H%M%S_' -f '%SB' "${f}")

    # for testing purposes show the full path of the filename with the prefaced creation date
    # ${f:h:r} is the path and ${f:t} is just the original filename 
    # printf '%s%s\n' "${f:h:r}/${cdatetime}${f:t}"

    # rename the original file to its prefaced date/time string
    /bin/mv "${f}" "${f:h:r}/${cdatetime}${f:t}"
done
exit 0

Then save the Automator application to your Desktop and then double-click to open a folder chooser from which to select a single folder containing the files you wish to rename. Use a test folder with a few files first to ensure that the result is acceptible for selecting the real folder.

VikingOSX wrote:

Rename each file so that it is prefaced by its creation date/time. Foo.ext becomes YYYY-mm-dd_HHMMSS_foo.ext.

Thanks for the script. I rename all my images and movies as YYYY-MMDD-hhmm-ss.* with GraphicConverter or exiftool. For practice I modified that script accordingly (see below).

It seems to work OK, but if there are duplicate file creation dates with the same file suffixes, it overwrites the duplicates. That can be prevented by adding -n or -i to the mv command but then it renames only the 1st such duplicate.

It seems other mv variants can bypass this with something like 'mv --backup=numbered' which cause mv to auto-append numbers to the duplicates but that option does not seem to be in macOS Sonoma mv.

for f in "$@"
do
    # assign YYYY-mmdd-HHMM-SS_ as creation date (%SB) to cdatetime
    cdatetime=$(/usr/bin/stat -t '%Y-%m%d-%H%M-%S' -f '%SB' "${f}")

    # ${f:h:r} is the path and ${f:e} is just the original suffix
    # rename the original file to date/time string
    /bin/mv -n "${f}" "${f:h:r}/${cdatetime}.${f:e}"
done
exit 0

Screen capture your Automator workflow window and then use the second icon from the right (in this editor) to post it in a reply. That way, we can see what approach you are presently using.

It doesn't seem to affect the date format though.

Maybe use Shortcuts. It seems to have a fully configurable format:

I find Shortcuts sometimes a bit more confusing than Automator. I did not try to create the entire shortcut.

It is best to leave slashes and colons out of filenames. Both Finder and the UNIX shell will thank you. Can you live with this date/time preface:

2024-08-24_070000_foo.ext

where the time is exactly 7 am. Looks quite ugly with other separators between hours, minutes, and seconds.

• Is your batch process selecting a folder and renaming the files in that folder?
  • More than one folder level depth in that primary folder?
  • All files, or specific files bearing a particular extension(s)?

Here is a sample Automator application that prompts you for a folder and applies the date/time creation date (%SB) preface to each found file in that folder. I have the UNIX rename (/bin/mv) commented in my example because I just want to see the applied preface to each file:

/Users/viking/Desktop/Pages_Docs/2024-04-02_100436_text_svg_13_1.pages
/Users/viking/Desktop/Pages_Docs/2024-04-02_100436_ph.pages
/Users/viking/Desktop/Pages_Docs/2024-04-02_100436_eqn.pages
/Users/viking/Desktop/Pages_Docs/2024-04-02_100436_4pager.pages

The %Y that you used is only 24 of 2024.

%Y is 2024 (%y is 24). My images are 2001-0101-1200-00.jpg etc.

%Y is replaced by the year with century as a decimal number.

%y is replaced by the year without century as a decimal number (00-99).

https://man.openbsd.org/strftime.3

Your reference to a mv --backup syntax is a GNU mv feature and macOS only offers the BSD mv which I am using.

Since macOS will not permit two identically named files to co-exist in the same directory, it won't matter if they have the same creation date/time as the entire filename with the prepended date/time string cannot be duplicated either.

I chose to make the HHMMSS an integer rather than create more of an eyesore with extra punctuation marks. The %Y that you used is only 24 of 2024, but your choices of formatting are your own.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/strftime.html

Matti Haveri wrote:

The %Y that you used is only 24 of 2024.

%Y is 2024 (%y is 24). My images are 2001-0101-1200-00.jpg etc.

%Y is replaced by the year with century as a decimal number.

%y is replaced by the year without century as a decimal number (00-99).

https://man.openbsd.org/strftime.3

That was a typo on my behalf and meant %Y. Been coding strftime for decades as far back as UNIX SVR1.

so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

You should not use a forward slash in a file name on macOS. I don't even know why it is offered.

But, I don't know if that is your problem.

This sort of works as a Quick Action. However, it puts a ? before the file name. I don't know why. These are the kinds of things I don't understand about Shortcuts.

acadiard wrote:

I think Shortcuts might be above my capabilities

Try GraphicConverter.