Stampla

Deterministic, verifiable naming for photo and video archives.

stampla stamps every photo and video with 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:

• Everything on one timeline. 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 stampla

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

Usage

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