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Renaming Photo Files with Date Taken

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Hey all,

I'm running into an issue with Power Automate Desktop and renaming photo files. The process of bulk renaming is straight forward enough based on folder location. However, the "creation date" of the files/photos, which is what Power Automate uses when adding date/time is not the date I need to use. I need to use "Date Taken". Is there a way to pull this data into the name instead of the Date Created?

I'm currently thinking the only way to get this done is to use script to pull the exif data into an excel file and then rename all the files using the excel. Any thoughts/help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

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Power Automate Desktop

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ryule 929 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Aside from what you mentioned, the only way I think you could do that is to add timestamp actions before each screenshot, and append that to the name....but depending on how many you are doing, that could be quite a task.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Thanks! We have trail cameras set up for longterm monitoring of locations and are downloading thousands of photos a month, so I'm thinking excel is my best bet. Or just biting the bullet and not renaming them.

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ryule 929 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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Oh, sorry, I thought you were talking about screenshots taken by PAD!

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momlo 1,527 Super User 2024 Season 1 on at

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@Anonymous

You can pull the metadata using VB (visual basic). I remember an excellent post on this forum with an example code. Unfortunately, I can't recall who posted that, so try to search the forum.

edit - this post by @VJR

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Desktop/Rename-Mp3-Files-in-a-Folder-using-the-Title-in-the-metadata/m-p/1558628/highlight/true#M13748

Here is something similar on another forum:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/512d384b-9377-4dff-8061-3276fddb8c91/retrieving-file-metadata-using-vbnet?forum=vbgeneral

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Nived_Nambiar 18,138 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @Anonymous

try this vbs script using VBS script action. Here %photo_file% represent the file path of the file you need to get date taken defined in power automate desktop

Option Explicit

Dim photoPath, folder, filename, shell, folderItems, photoFile, dateTaken,filenameExt

' Replace with the path to your photo file
photoPath = "%photo_file%"

' Get the folder object that contains the photo file
folder = Left(photoPath, InStrRev(photoPath, "\") - 1)
' Get the photo file name
filename = Mid(photoPath, InStrRev(photoPath, "\") + 1)
' Load the shell.application COM object
Set shell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
' Get the folder items for the folder object
Set folderItems = shell.Namespace(folder).Items()

' Find the photo file in the folder items
For Each photoFile In folderItems
  filenameExt= Mid(photoFile.Path, InStrRev(photoFile.Path, "\") + 1)
  If filenameExt = filename Then
    ' Get the photo's date taken property
    dateTaken = photoFile.ExtendedProperty("{14B81DA1-0135-4D31-96D9-6CBFC9671A99} 36867")
    Exit For
  End If
Next

' Output the date taken
WScript.Echo dateTaken

Mark it as solution if it helps !

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