Automatically move photos to directories or folders based on exif date taken…
Here’s the scenario. You’ve been taking photos off and on for the past few weeks or months, but haven’t gotten around to downloading them from your camera or card to the computer. Then when you do, you have a folder full of photos from many different dates but the file dates are all the same since you downloaded them all at once. Wouldn’t it be nice to just automatically have them moved and sorted to directories based on the actual date the photo was taken?
I thought it would be nice. So I wrote this small app that will do that for you.
Download the PhotoMove program here and install it. When you run the program you will see the screen below.
To move or copy your photos to subdirectories:
1. Choose the directory with your photos in the top section.
2. Choose the directory under which you want the date sorted files to go.
3. Click on the ‘Find Photos’ Button. (A DOS command window will open and run Phil Harvey’s exiftool.) Wait for it to finish and the count of the number of files found and number of photos with exif creation dates will show.
4. Then click on either ‘Copy Image Files’ or ‘Move Image Files’.
This is a sample of what the folder (subdirectory) structure looks like after running PhotoMove on some miscellaneous photos:
I wrote this program to get an idea of how difficult it would be to work with exif data. I intend on modifying this and expanding it into a full fledged AUTOMATIC geotagging program that will hook photos with Google maps.
If you have any problems, or have any suggestions for new or different features, leave me a comment. I’ll get right back to you.
One caveat, lots of modern file types now store exif data. Some examples are Microsoft Excel files (.xls) and Adobe Acrobat PDF files (.pdf). So pay attention to what directories you pick to move or copy files from since this current version operates on ALL files with embedded exif data.
Click here to download PhotoMove Setup.
If you find this useful please leave a quick comment. I’d appreciate it. A small donation would really brighten my day! My sincere thanks!
Hey, Could you possibly make another version/option of the program that creates/sorts subfolders based on year and month instead of year month and day? I find year+month+day is creating far too many subfolders… If you do then please email me and i’ll try it out thanks
Dave
10 Aug 08 at 4:19 am
Well what could I say except “thank you”. This small application does what it is expected to do. It’s years I was hoping to find such an easy to use functionality to sort my pictures. After automatically retouching image exposure of my 706 holidays pictures, it sorted my pictures within minutes. Thank you
stef
6 Sep 08 at 11:24 am
stef:
Thanks a million for the nice comments. Glad you found it useful.
Dave:.
Modified program to only sort by month still coming! Probably the week after we get our first snow
Mike
6 Sep 08 at 9:41 pm
Excellent tool. Thanks, it saved me ton of time. It seems to have a problem in processing multiple directories, but still very useful.
Alper
4 Jan 09 at 9:03 am
Mike you are a life saver. Great work and thanks for making this neat tool available!
Frank
22 Jan 09 at 4:37 pm
Looks like a superb program. Would it be possible to have a feature to “Include File Type” from a list so that you include only pictures, or clip art, or spreadsheets. etc?
Ron
31 Jan 09 at 11:18 am
Thanks, I have seen so many commercial phot organizers out there but they all this great feature. This is what everybody liks to have, organize based on the time line.
Thank You for a great tool.
srinivas
2 Mar 09 at 9:11 am
Great Little proggie
Is there a maximum number of files/photos that it can handle?
Keep up the great work
Steve
Steve
9 May 09 at 6:48 am
Hey Mike,
Thanks for your tool. It placed my pics in subfolders in a blink of an eye on windows vista. Super!
Anonymous
9 May 09 at 2:09 pm
If we could choose the ammount of directory levels it would be very interesting…
Year
Year/month
Year/month/day (current app)
best regards,
Bernardo Fortes
26 May 09 at 4:00 pm
You’re in the top 10 of my “small programs that I actually find really useful and well written”. My friend has thousands of photos of his family scattered all over his computer in no particular order or location. Each time he gets a new digital camera, the program that comes with it dumps into a different place… and now they can’t find anything. He guilted me into helping him organize them, so I’m glad I found your program. It was either spending hours and hours organizing, or hours and hours writing program of my own! Thank you so much. Very, very much.
Sphfynktre
10 Jul 09 at 11:01 pm
Great application! Thank you for publishing it!
Petros
29 Jul 09 at 4:46 am
[...] 3. Use PhotoMove to sort + move the pictures from the temporary folder to the final resting place of… [...]
Rantings of a Road Warrior » Pictures taken workstream
6 Aug 09 at 9:25 pm
Hi Mike.
Great piece of software, it took a while to sort the pics I have (over 200k) but it did the job well.
I found a bug in the software.
It moves all files not just pictures, I had a directory with random unsorted files (word, PDF, excel) and it moved them all.
Feature requests:
Can you make the source code available? I am happy to attempt to update it.
Log file option to undo things that could happen in the bug discovered above.
Progress report/bar.
Once again, many thanks for a great piece of software
Subhi
Subhi S Hashwa
6 Sep 09 at 8:52 pm
@Subhi,
Thanks for the comment. Sounds like you had a lot of photos to sort.
I did have an note in the post that current Microsoft and Adobe PDF files also have an embedded exif section and that these would be moved if they were included. I ‘bolded’ those sentences in the post so future users will have a better chance of seeing it before they use the program.
For anyone who has a lot of photos to sort, I would suggest they move all the .jpgs to a temporary directory or folder before they start. Then you won’t have to worry about have other file types included. Then run PhotoMove and it’ll sort them all by date into new folders where you specify.
Mike
Mike
6 Sep 09 at 9:11 pm
This is the TOPS! many thanks. It does exactly what I wanted it to do.
MC
11 Nov 09 at 11:46 am
Hi Mike,
Very useful software. Nice and simple.
I have one question in that when the program creates the directories at the day level it puts a space after the year but it doent do this at other levels. eg the monthly level wii be 2009/2009_10 but the day level will be 200/2009 _10_25.
Is there any reason for this or have I installed it incorrectly?
Thanks
Glen
19 Dec 09 at 5:51 pm
Does the job for sure! Thanks.
John
5 Feb 10 at 9:51 am
Great work… saved me writing my own!
Andrew
6 Feb 10 at 4:55 am