Currently, I'm working on a python3 script that helps me sort the Google Photos takeout files. The Takeout service for Google Photos actually strips all the metadata of an image/video into a separate JSON file.

This script that I'm working on helps me to merge the timestamp present in the JSON file into its subsequent photo or video. In order to achieve this, I'm currently using - ExifTool by Phil Harvey, which is a Perl executable. I call this tool in a subprocess to edit the Date tags in EXIF/Metadata.

This process is quite hefty and is taking a large amount of time. Then I realised that most of my photos are JPG and videos are MP4, it is very easy to edit Exif data of JPG files in python using some of the libraries present & for the lesser proportion of photos like PNG I can use exiftool.

This has drastically improved the runtime of my script. Now I want to know that is there any way to edit the creation dates of MP4 files natively in python which can theoretically execute faster than the subprocess method.

Please help! Thanks in advance.

CodePudding user response：

Im not too familiar with it, but ffmpeg seems like an option for just the mp4's.

cmd = 'ffmpeg -i "file.mp4" -codec copy -metadata timestamp="new_time_here" "output.mp4"'
subprocess.call(shlex.split(cmd))

modified from: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/3yotj2/comment/cyfiyb7/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3