Rediscovering Photography

I’ve told myself over and over that if a person wants to take some good photos, you have to go take pictures! I think we all forget this from time to time.

If you have a half hour to spare on a nice day, grab a sandwich and your camera and head to the nearest park. You might be surprised what you might be able to capture.

Even a goofy chipmunk makes a good picture after a few days off from the camera habit.

It was interesting to see what appeared after sitting for just 15 minutes or so.

I put my telephoto lens on and set the shutter speed to 1/1000 of a second. When something moved I shot it <grin>. Nice bright sunny days make this easy.

It was nice sitting out in the sun. And in the Zen spirit, on a nice spring day, it’s good for the soul to spend a little time contemplating nature and letting a little bit of stress go. I did have to walk about ten steps to take the shot of the Mallard. But I managed that feat of exercise without a sweat.

Don’t waste the nice days. A half hour break with your camera in your hand beats an hour of sitting at your desk eating your sandwich and looking at all the emails in your inbox.

So bust loose and do it. The emails will not mind waiting.

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 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.

A shot of an old barn modified with Corel Paint Shop Pro X2.

(Original photo below right >>–>)