Rediscovering Photography

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. 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 called PhotoMove that will do that for you.

How to Install and Use:

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.

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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!