chronocatalog 0.4.0

Deterministic, verifiable naming for photo and video archives

ChronoCatalog

Deterministic, verifiable naming for photo and video archives.

chronocatalog renames every photo and video to an identity derived purely from the file itself — the capture time plus a slice of the content hash:

20260703_150727_9b677b64.nef
└──────┬──────┘ └──┬───┘
  capture time    hash

That name is a stable, unique identifier with properties a filename usually doesn't have:

• Chronological by construction. Sorting by name is sorting by capture time, across every camera, phone and scanner — no rolling counters, no IMG_0001 (2).jpg.
• Verifiable. Because the name is reproducible from the file, the whole archive can be re-checked at any time: corruption is told apart from legitimate edits, and duplicates identify themselves.
• Groups stay whole. A RAW master, its XMP/PP3 sidecars and its editor derivatives share one name and are renamed together, atomically.

Install

$ pip install chronocatalog

Python 3.11+ and ExifTool on PATH; no other dependencies.

Usage

command	what it does
import	copy a memory card into the archive, named on arrival; exit 0 certifies the card is fully accounted for — safe to format
verify	recompute every name and report what disagrees, classified by meaning (corruption vs. expected drift vs. date mismatch)
rename	bring stale names in line, atomically per file group
inject	let a DAM (Lightroom Classic) rename the masters it manages, via a metadata token
organize	report-only triage for messy trees: proposals, duplicates, undatable files
history / undo / resume	every apply is journaled: list runs, revert them, finish interrupted ones

Safety first: every command is a dry run unless --apply. Applies are validated as a whole before anything is touched, journaled before the first change, applied atomically per group, resumable after interruption and revertable — and a file whose capture time cannot be resolved is reported, never renamed. Nothing is ever overwritten.

See the command guide for details, output formats and the exit-code contract, and DESIGN.md for why it works this way.

Configuration

An archive is described by a TOML file; every setting has a sensible default. See six complete example setups — from a single folder of photos to a Lightroom workflow and a naming-scheme migration — and the annotated example config for every option.

License

MIT