How does one change the date format for PlayMemories Home folders?

Question

I am using PlayMemories Home Version 2.0.00.11271 and have many folders within it which contain only photographs imported from my Sony DSC-H9.  Unfortunately, PlayMemories Home insists upon dating all folders in a month/day/year manner; and this makes little sense if one wishes to have the folders listed in logical chronological order.  How can I change the date format to year/month/day?  Changing the name of each folder, one by one, will take a very long time!  Your helpful advice in this matter will be greatly appreciated.  Thank you. System information:
Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Service pack : Service Pack 3
Memory: 1.5 GB
Processor:         Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.86GHz
Max. clock speed: 1.86
Manufacturer: IBM
Model: 1847W76
System language setting: English (United States)
User language setting: English (United States) 

Answer 1

I too thought that the folder naming format was obviously wrong and couldn't find a way to change it. I do agree that placing photos in folders according to when they were taken is a great idea. I had been considering writing some software to do just that. After discovering that PlayMemories does it, I had it re-import all my photos. Then I wrote a small Perl script to rename all of the folders into year-month-day format. Included here is the Perl script. It only acts on a single folder - use it on the root folder where all the PlayMemories folders are. It will rename all folders currently in a month-day-year format. I used it without problems but of course there is no guarentee that it is error free. This should work with any common version of Perl. Tom # There should be one command line argument: the directory to act upon
if ( scalar(@ARGV) == 0 ){
 print "Usage: RenameDirs <dir>\n";
 print " Where dir is the directory containing the directories to rename.\n";
 exit;
$mydir = $ARGV[0];
chdir $mydir or die "Couldn't chdir to $mydir: $!";
opendir(ROOTPHOTODIR, ".") or die "Failed to open the pictures directory $mydir: $!";
@allphotodirs = readdir ROOTPHOTODIR;
closedir ROOTPHOTODIR;
foreach $dir (@allphotodirs) {
 if ( -d $dir ) {
  print "$dir is a directory";
  if ( $dir =~ /^(\d{1,2})-(\d{1,2})-(\d{4})$/ ) {
   print " and has the proper format: month $1 day $2 year $3 and will be renamed to ";
   $newname = sprintf "%4u-%02u-%02u", $3, $1, $2;
   print "$newname\n";
   rename $dir, $newname or die "failed to rename $dir to $newname: $!";
  else {
   print " but is not of the proper format\n"
 elsif ( -f $dir ) {
  print "$dir is a file\n";
 else {
  print "$dir is neither a directory nor a file\n";
}