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 memory 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.
I thought it would be nice. So I wrote this small app called PhotoMove that will do that for you.
How to Install and Use PhotoMove:
All you have to do is download the PhotoMove program and install it. When you run the program you will see this screen:
To move or copy your photos to subdirectories:
1. In the top section choose the directory that contains your unsorted photos.
2. Then 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. If you have a huge number of files it can take a long time. 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’. Photomove will move or copy your files to new directories under the one you specified.
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 thing to be aware of: 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 PhotoMove will find ALL files with embedded exif data. If you have a spread sheet or a pdf in the directory it will also move it a new folder based on the date it was created.
Don’t worry though, PhotoMove never deletes any files.
(Opens in a new window.)
If you find this program useful, or if you have suggestions or ideas for changes or improvements, please leave a quick not in the comments box at the very bottom of this page. I’d appreciate it.
A small donation ($5 is large, btw) would really brighten my day! And the good feeling you get from giving would brighten yours! 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
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
Oh my God!!! Thank you so much for making this. I have been manually sorting my pictures this way slowly and have been looking for something like this. Helped get my 20k picture library under control!
Jason
10 Oct 10 at 4:58 pm
Excellent piece of software! Does what Picasa etc. should but don’t. Thanks.
Tim
27 Nov 10 at 10:00 am
Personally I really like this program as it sorts pretty much the way i do myself – EXCELLENT WORK and I’ve donated a few dollars to (hopefully) find an updated program sometime in 2011 (with all the new features I describe underneath
In the future options 1 and 2 could you possibly add the features of choosing format of foldernames and if you want to move all files (or add your own extensions
in the folders.
Personally – since I’ve archived my pictures the same way since 2001 – I use this program to copy/move from my cameras memory cards, with new cameras now you also have video…and it’s not so fun to move them manually afterwards. I also like to sort my pictures in directories in yymmdd – makes them very easy to sort and to find chronologically + keeps the names compact. Just a little nitpicking on an otherwise exellent program
Ove
24 Dec 10 at 6:12 am
Almost forgot – Merry Christmas
Ove
24 Dec 10 at 6:13 am
Thanks very much for this small but time saving tool… definitively a must-have for who, like me, takes tons of pictures.
Alex
4 Feb 11 at 10:09 pm
Brilliant, simple program, thanks.
What would happen if I attempted to move a whole load of files into a directory where I had already moved a whole load of files and duplicate file names existed (they would infact be duplicate files)? Would the files be renamed, replaced, or not moved?
I would simply try but I could end up with even more chaos than I am already trying to sort out!
Thanks again.
Geoff
22 Apr 11 at 1:24 pm
Still looking for an updated version of one ginormously helpful program
Like I said on Xmas-eve last year, would be nice to choose your own archiving-method. I like the approach they have in Eye-Fi. I’ve set it up for yyyy_mm\yymmdd, they give the variables like this
I keep recommending this little gem to all those interested in photography !
%Y_%m\%y%m%d. %Y and %y gives 4- or 2-digit year, m is month (2-digits), and d is day (2-digits). If something like this could be worked into PhotoMove I’d be very, very happy – and probably donate again
Ove
19 May 11 at 6:32 pm
It is amazing that this is the best I have found on the internet any where, I have a collection of 142Gb of photos – As i use my camera all the time, and like other comments here, not just one camera.
Great work
Thanks
Malcolm
23 May 11 at 2:59 am
Hi Geoff, If the files are exact duplicates, they would be replaced.
Mike
18 Jun 11 at 3:53 pm
Hi, thanks for the great program. I was hoping the dates would separated by dashes. Otherwise, a great GUI to exiftool. Suggestion for the future is to allow our own file mask.
Sun
11 Jul 11 at 10:53 am
Thanks for the comment Sun. Your idea to (optionally) allow the user to specify their own file mask is a very good one. It will be included in the next revision.
I appreciate your taking the time to give feedback!
Thanks,
Mike
Mike
11 Jul 11 at 10:59 am
Great application! I have a request, same thing exactly for video files “AVI & MOV” mostly, is it possible?
Hassan
Hassan
20 Jul 11 at 10:21 am
Great little app. Very timesaving. Thanks very much
Suggestion (may have already been made) to have an input which allows people to choose their own method of naming the folder e.g. yyyymmdd; yyyy-mm-dd; yyyy_mm_dd etc.
Nick
14 Aug 11 at 12:53 pm
It looks like I am having only one problem.. [Balance Edited}
skip
25 Aug 11 at 7:05 pm
I just wanted to reply to this comment because of it’s unusual nature.
I really do appreciate all the hundreds of people who have downloaded and are using PhotoMove. Currently somewhere between 200 and 500 copies are downloaded every month. And the program has been stable for a long time.
So I was a little surprised to see the above user comment about an install problem. All comments get immediately routed to my email so that I can respond if necessary. Since this one indicated there was a problem I wrote an email back explaining the options that he could try initially to sort things out. And then wrote out how he could contact me if he still had additional problems.
It didn’t take a ‘long’ time to do this. But everything does take time doesn’t it?
I hit the send button on my email to send my reply. Almost immediately the email was bounced back to me saying the user had provided a phony email address.
I have never had anything like this happen before. I don’t know why someone would take the time to do this intentionally. So to the user that sent the email. (I don’t have your name because you entered the phony name ‘skip’ in the name field.) If you really do have a problem and if (by chance) you accidentally entered your email address incorrectly, please use the contact me page or post another comment with a valid name and email address so I can get in touch with you.
I’d be happy to help you out.
Mike
Mike
25 Aug 11 at 9:59 pm
Most comments seem to be favourable although I have not yet downloaded and tried the prog, but……… will it sort in my case CR2 files, or any other raw files for that matter?
It just seems a weakness with all these sort of progs
Nick
15 Oct 11 at 1:27 am
Hi Nick,
The PhotoMove program searches through all files in the specified directory and looks for valid exif information. If your CR2 files contain exif information in the format given in the Exif Standard then the program will also work on them. If you have files in CR2 (or any other proprietary RAW format for that matter) simply download PhotoMove and give it a try. You could test it by making a new folder and copying a few of your photo files into it. Then run the program.
I’m sorry but I don’t have the ability to test the program on the hundreds of different proprietary formats put out by the various camera manufacturers. But as I stated above, many files (such as Microsoft Excel for example) contain Standard Exif data even though you might wonder why they do. Give it a try! PhotoMove doesn’t change or damage your files. If it doesn’t work, just delete the program. It won’t hurt my feelings.
Mike
Mike
17 Oct 11 at 1:40 pm
Amazing app! Works great! Even works with Nikon RAW format. I only wish it have more options for date format an so… GOOD JOB 5 star!!!
HLeXpert
21 Nov 11 at 4:50 pm
Nick,
Great job. Thank you for making this available and the wonderful software you created!!!!
David
11 Jan 12 at 4:18 pm
We have an automated system that got away from us and created a large number of JPG files in need of organization (just as you describe by year, month, day).
The problem is the exif dates are mixed up in these files so that modified date is actually creation date.
It is possible to have a switch to pick modified date for the input?
Rob
10 Mar 12 at 8:57 am
Hi Rob,
I’m emailing you a reply. We’ll see what we can do.
Thanks,
Mike
Mike
10 Mar 12 at 9:04 am
I have to say that Mike was most helpful. Thank you Mike. He suggested another tool (DropIt at http://dropit.sourceforge.net/) that fit the bill exactly. If you need help, ask Mike.
Rob
10 Mar 12 at 6:33 pm
Unbelievably awesome…I accidentally formatted my hard drive with all of our pictures. AFter I recovered them I relaized it may take a year or two to re-organize…not now. Awesome, just awesom.
One question though, what is the highest number of pictures the program will process at once without crashing?
Brian
Brian
11 May 12 at 5:02 pm
Thanks Brian!
Glad it worked out for you!
Regarding your questions about the total number of files the program will processs, I would have to say that the number would depend on your operating system and computer’s memory.
If you try to process a large number of files at one time (many hundreds or thousands) the program can run for a long time. It can seem that your computer locks up, but it is just the program processing the large amount of files.
If you have too many files and the program does not seem to work, move some of the files into a different folder and then work on a smaller batch of files at one time. Hope this helps.
Thanks again,
Mike
Mike
11 May 12 at 11:52 pm