Well, a few weeks ago my dad tipped me off to Wal-Mart‘s latest photo-department promotion: 12-cent prints. Well, forever curious, we dug a bit deeper.

For the low-low price of 12-cents a print, you can upload your pictures via the internet to be centrally processed at their main lab, and have the results shipped to your home. But an even better deal is to just pay 15-cents a print, and have the results delivered to the nearest Wal-Mart (skipping shipping-and-handling charges). My dad tried it first with a small batch of 30 pictures, and it worked great!

Well, that sold me on it. His standards for good photos are way higher than mine, and 15 cents per 4×6 is cheaper than I can print them myself. Plus, I’ve got nearly 2000 photos that we’ve taken of Rhianna over the 2.5 years of her life that really need to be developed. Laura’s been on me for the last 2 years to print them, but I just haven’t been happy with the results. So this was my chance. Wal-mart limits you to 200MB of photo’s at a time, so I grabbed as many as I could (~350) and uploaded them. Came in at just over $50. We got the results in today.

Well, the good news first: The photos look great. Right on time, no hassle, and great developed-photo quality. The bad news: I think we’re missing a few. We got 325, with a receipt claiming 326. I’m pretty sure I uploaded 358, but the website only shows 242. The numbers just don’t make any sense, and I really don’t enjoy the thought of digging through my hard drive to find out which ones are missing, and then trying to convince someone at wal-mart about all of it. Also, in the early days of my Digital Camera experiences, I didn’t really know how to work the camera so the pictures only show the Day-of-month, and time. So I have alot of pictures taken on the “22nd”, but I don’t know which month.

But I have an idea: When I view the details here in Windows, it gives me a “Picture Taken” tag that must be in the header of the files. Surely there’s a tool (preferably free) out there that can read that & add a small watermark or text overlay onto the image of the date. If there is, then that’ll fix the date problem. Furthermore, if I could get a small app that would let me simply add a small incrementing number to the corner of each image, then I could quickly and easily sort the images and find out which ones are missing in the next big batch.

So, here’s where I need your help: What tool will do this? Preferably automatically on a large number of files, without losing image quality (These are all JPG’s). I have a feeling that I can do it with the ImageMagick tools, but I’ld need to do some reading. Anyone know of anything else?

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