Automatically move photos to directories or folders based on exif date taken…

May 3rd, 2008 | by Mike |

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.

image

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:

PhotoMoveDirStructure.png 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.

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  1. 3 Responses to “Automatically move photos to directories or folders based on exif date taken…”

  2. By Dave on Aug 10, 2008 | Reply

    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 :D

  3. By stef on Sep 6, 2008 | Reply

    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

  4. By Mike on Sep 6, 2008 | Reply

    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 .

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