[Feature] When no exif timestamp, select filename as timestamp source if corresponding to a pattern

[Chuckame]

The feature

Issue

I have a lot of photos coming from whatsapp, and they are not storing exif data.

Because of that miss, immich fallback on the file creation date.

Feature request

It would be nice to fallback first on the file name if it respect a pattern (that is done by a lot of apps, like facebook, whatsapp, android camera, ...). Also, having multiple patterns would be awesome, even more if it's customizable (env vars at least).

Here is for whatsapp a regex as an example: (VID|IMG)-(?<year>\d{4})(?<month>\d{2})(?<day>\d{2})-WA\d+. That will match and retrieve the year, month and day. If not matching, then fallback as usual using the file creation date.

I did not find an explicit feature request of this. Feel free to close/link to other discussions

Platform

• Server
• Web
• Mobile

[Sums123]

Hi, not sure if you are already aware, but until Immich implements such a feature, exiftool has proven helpful to me
https://exiftool.org/faq.html

exiftool "-alldates<filename" c:\images

[Chuckame]

OH, really? I'll look at it! Thanks

[unhighghlow]

It would also be really useful if you could manually specify the date-matching regex or multiple regexes, which the server could try sequentially for each asset missing a date. (Or manually triggered)

[pulpog]

There was a lot of discussion regarding this in now-closed duplicate (#9116).
This is actually a generic problem with any photos lacking exif, regardless of their source. iPhones further do not save WhatsApp images with a datestamp filename (instead with a UUID) so this would be a partial solution. At least with iPhone, the saved date is available to apps from the device timeline.