Storing photos

02 Nov, 2022

I have the digital camera for about 20 years now. My photo collection is near 140GB - mostly personal and family pictures, ton of pictures of my kids. To handle it somehow, I had to have some workflow for storing them.

Over the year I have found one way to keep them organised. The main directory structure includes directories named by the year (2001, 2002, n), when the picture was taken. Each year has subdirectories named with the date and description. For example: 2015/20151011-Auntie_Birthday ¹.

All the pictures inside those directories have the original file name given by the camera with the suffix including date and hour when it was taken. For example: PXB0001_20050111_1050.jpg using the YYYYMMDD_HHMI format.

Below is the script I am using to automate adding the suffix to the files. It is not masterpiece of programming, but it works.

#!/bin/sh

FIND_CMD=$(find . -type f -and -iname "*.jpg" -or -iname "*.png" -or -iname "*.cr2" 2> /dev/null | sed -e "s/^\.\///g")

for file in $FIND_CMD; do
    echo ${file}
    file_name=${file%.*}
    file_ext=${file#*.}
    file_date=`stat -c %x ${file} | cut -d. -f1 | sed 's/-//g' | sed 's/://g' | sed 's/ /_/g' | cut -c 1-13`
    new_file_name=${file_name}_${file_date}.${file_ext}
    echo "Renaming ${file} to ${new_file_name}..."
    mv ${file} ${new_file_name}
    echo ""
done

Here some of the "magic" explained:

• sed -e "s/^.\///g"- remove the ./ prefix from all of the paths returned by the find command
• ${file%.*} - returns the file_name part from the file path
• ${file#*.} - same like above, but return the file extension
• stat -c %x ${file} | cut -d. -f1 | sed 's/-//g' | sed 's/://g' | sed 's/ /_/g' | cut -c 1-13 - this one is parsing an output from stat command returning the last modification date of the file

There is an RSS feed for this blog.

#life