Windows file search based on timestamp

[PeteSmith]

Hi, I have about 14000 images in a folder with the following name structure:

snap_c1_261009_150916.jpg

The images are from a IP camera, 1 image saved every hour. The above was saved today at 15.09. (and 16 seconds)

What is the search criteria i need to use to retrieve the image every day for the last 12 months at 9am, 1pm, and 5pm. Bare in mind the time stamp may change slighly everyday, so i need to mask it somehow. I assume i can do this somehow using the date stamp, not sure what the syntax is.

[Singh400]

Should be possible, check out this link. It should give you a good starting point.

It may also be worth checking out the find and dir commands in cmd line.

Sorry I couldn't help much! Let us know how you do it in the end!

[PeteSmith]

I looked at this page earlier today after doing a google search, it lists day, month, year etc but not time. Thats the key criteria of this search. For example the following

datemodified:>‎29/‎01/‎2007 17:32 <29/01/2007 17:34

returns images on the specified date between two timestamps. But you still need to specify an exact date, meaning i would have to manually change the search criteria 1095 times for every year of photos (assuming i want to retrieve 3 images a day at specified times).

Does anyone know of a way to apply a mask to this search filter, i.e.

datemodified:>‎xx/‎xx/‎xxxx 17:32 <xx/xx/xxxx 17:34

So it would return any images between 17.32 and 17:34 regardless of date.

I'm starting to think the only way i'm going to do this is by creating an xcopy script or similar. Really was hoping there was a built in filter for this.

[Singh400]

Originally Posted by PeteSmith

I looked at this page earlier today after doing a google search, it lists day, month, year etc but not time. Thats the key criteria of this search. For example the following

datemodified:>‎29/‎01/‎2007 17:32 <29/01/2007 17:34

returns images on the specified date between two timestamps. But you still need to specify an exact date, meaning i would have to manually change the search criteria 1095 times for every year of photos (assuming i want to retrieve 3 images a day at specified times).

Does anyone know of a way to apply a mask to this search filter, i.e.

datemodified:>‎xx/‎xx/‎xxxx 17:32 <xx/xx/xxxx 17:34

So it would return any images between 17.32 and 17:34 regardless of date.

I'm starting to think the only way i'm going to do this is by creating an xcopy script or similar. Really was hoping there was a built in filter for this.

Does * not work? As in...

datemodified:>‎**/**/**** 17:32 <**/**/**** 17:34 

Worth a shot, no?

[PeteSmith]

Originally Posted by Singh400

Does * not work? As in...

datemodified:>‎**/**/**** 17:32 <**/**/**** 17:34 

Worth a shot, no?

Sadly it doesn't.

[arthurleung]

Can you not use some other tools. Plenty of file managers around, like Total Commander.

[PeteSmith]

Originally Posted by arthurleung

Can you not use some other tools. Plenty of file managers around, like Total Commander.

From what i can see i have the same problem with Total Commander as i did with the windows search, i can't search by time stamp alone.

[PeteSmith]

Well i did it, for those interested here's how:

I output the file attributes for each picture in the directory to excel, using the following batch commands:

dir %1 > C:\Users\<username>\Desktop\filelist.xls
start /max C:\Users\<username>\Desktop\filelist.xls
exit

once the file list was in excel i could use text to columns to remove the time stamp from the date using space as the delimiter. I could then filter and sort on time alone, as i required. This reduced the number of images from ~27000 to 1882.

I saved the list from excel to a text file. I then used the following command to copy the files listed in the text file to a new directory.

for /f %a in ('type C:\Users\<username>\Desktop\filelist.xls') do copy %a C:\temp\pics

Easy when you know how, can't help but think this could of been so much easier if the OS recognises the date and time stamps seperately.