orgnanize-photos

A pair of bash scripts that facilitate sorting many photos into folders by date taken.

Description

For these scripts to work properly, the movefiles and movemovies files must be placed in a directory contained in $PATH, and each of op, om, movefiles, and movemovies must be executable. These scripts may not handle file names with spaces correctly, such files will probably not be sorted.

Once the above conditions are met, place all photos that need to be sorted into a single directory, which is where the scripts will create directories and sort the photos. Once this is done, the program can be called by simply issuing the command

op year1 year2

where year is the year you wish to begin sorting, and year2 is the year you wish to end sorting with. For example,

op 2016 2023

would sort all photos found (of the given filetypes, described below) that were taken between January 1 of 2016 and December 31 of 2023, (all photos that have readable metadata that is). This will be done by creating the directories

2016/
2017/
2018/
2019/
2020/
2021/
2022/
2023/

one for each year between the years specified by the user, and then creating the directories

2016/January/
2016/February/
...
2023/November/
2023/December/

The script will then search through photos and, looking at the date the image was taken, move it to the corresponding directory. Photos taken outside the provided years will not be moved. Photos with empty or nonreadable metadata will not be moved.

The om command functions exactly the same, though looks through different filetypes, and uses a different tool to analyze the metadata of each file. This script is much slower (processing about four files per second), but I found that the exiv2 tool used in the op script could not reliably read the metadata on many of the video files I was working with when these files were created.

The movefiles and movemovies scripts are not intended to be called by the user.

Fine-tuning

To add additional filetypes to either script, simply copy and paste one of the if..fi blocks in the op or om files, and replace the filetype with the one desired.