photosorter

A little Python script to keep my photos from Dropbox organized. Designed to be run intermittently, but will run forever by default.

It watches a source directory for modifications and moves new image files to a target directory depending on when the photo was taken, using EXIF data and creation date as a fallback. There is also an option to move existing photos.

Directory and file names follow a simple naming convention (YYYY-MM/YYY_MM_DD/YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.ext) that keeps everything neatly organized. Duplicates are detected and ignored based on their SHA1 hash and folder path. Photos taken in the same instant get de-duplicated by adding a suffix (-1, -2, etc) to their filenames.

The result looks somewhat like this:

├── 2013-01
│   ├── 2013_01_05
│   │   ├── 2013-01-05 13.24.45.jpg
│   │   ├── 2013-01-05 14.25.54.jpg
│   │   └── 2013-01-05 21.28.48-1.jpg
│   ├── 2013_01_06
│   │   ├── 2013-01-06 16.05.02.jpg
│   │   ├── 2013-01-06 19.59.25.jpg
│   │   ├── 2013-01-06 20.40.28.jpg
│   │   └── 2013-01-06 21.14.38.jpg
│   └── 2013_01_08
│       └── 2013-01-08 11.45.51.jpg
├── 2013-02
|   └─ ...
├── ...
├── 2013-12
├── 2014-01
├── 2014-02
├── ...
├── 2014-12
├── ...

I use C:\Users\[windows username]\Dropbox\Camera Uploads as the source directory and Z:\Photos as the target. This allows me to move my photo from Dropbox to a local drive, and merge them with the rest of my photo collection.

Inspired by

• <http://simplicitybliss.com/exporting-your-iphoto-library-to-dropbox/>

• <https://github.com/wting/exifrenamer>

• <http://chambersdaily.com/learning-to-love-photo-management/>

• <https://dbader.org/blog/how-to-store-photos-in-the-cloud-and-avoid-vendor-lock-in>

> pip install minchin.scripts.photosorter

pip install argcomplete>=1.3.0
pip install ExifRead>=2.1.2
pip install watchdog>=0.8.3

> photosorter src_dir dest_dir

> photosorter src_dir dest_dir --move-existing