Years back, I hosted several large photo galleries on a public website. Password-protected, but my family was the only consumer of the data anyway. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I decided to migrate that to my growing internal network, because I have disk space, backups, and faster networking. Plus that old gallery software was getting long in the tooth and I didn’t feel like continuing to maintain it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dilemma: The old gallery was one of those, like most of them, that import the files, give them a long filename and remove the uploaded copy. So there was no rhyme or reason to the 11G of photos on that server, just a single flat gigantic directory of JPG files, over 1500 of them in total.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It only took a few minutes to realize that there seemed to be three paths — (1) a fully manual path of uploading all of the files in a batch into the new photo management app (I’m using Lychee, by the way) and then sorting through them; (2) a less manual, but still involved, path of logging into the old gallery and exporting\/downloading each set; or (3) finding a smarter way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I chose (3) finding a smarter way. I realized that my photo sets were all event-based, and the date of those events are stored in the EXIF data of each individual photo file. So I wondered if there was an easy way to extract that in a useful way, and then possibly script it to segregated it by date. I quickly found something even better — the exiftool itself (installed on my macbook with Homebrew) will easily do exactly that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Will siphon through an entire directory, lickety-split, pull out the capture date from the EXIF data, and then file them in a directory named for the YYYY-MM-DD of the date. It will even create the directories if they don’t exist. I went in seconds from a flat directory of over 1500 files to, let’s see…. 12 individual date directories, each filled with a day of photos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lychee lets me import directories and will name them “[IMPORT] (directory name)” so all I have to do once they’re all imported is to log into Lychee, look into each newly-imported directory to figure out what the event was, and rename the album. Fun stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Years back, I hosted several large photo galleries on a public website. Password-protected, but my family was the only consumer of the data anyway. I decided to migrate that to … <\/p>\nexiftool '-Directory<DateTimeOriginal' -d %Y-%m-%d \"$dir\"<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n