Organize your photos & video using exiftool
If you are as comfortable as me working with command line interfaces, you would rather have tools that work well with or without a GUI. I can get batches done much faster using the command line interface. Here I’ll show you how I convert personal media files to be organized in my collection. I would usually do this all in linux, but since most of my family uses the one windows 10 machine in the house, I do this conversion on the windows 10 box.
It has been a while since I’ve organized all the videos and photos our family has taken using various devices. #exiftool written by Phil Harvey is great to do what I want by taking the files embedded metadata and converting them to filenames. He first written it as a perl script, but now is wrapped in a Windows and Mac executable.
So I like to organize my files by:
1. year 2. day of photos 3. photo stamped with date and time
to use exiftool, I first copy all the photos/video I want to process in a directory called exifworking/00queue then to covert the format I use the following commands:
FIRST RUN THIS TO NORMALIZE THE FILES TO DATE-TIMESTAMPS
exiftool –ext [file_extension] -r "-FileName<${DateTimeOriginal}.%le" -d %Y%m%d_%H%M%S%%-.c [directory]
THEN RUN THIS TO CONVERT DIRECTORY
exiftool –ext [file_extension] -r "-directory<${DateTimeOriginal}-%le" -d %Y%m%d [directory]
so for a .jpg file set I would run the following:
exiftool –ext jpg -r "-FileName<${DateTimeOriginal}.%le" -d %Y%m%d_%H%M%S%%-.c 00queue
This converts the filename to a datetime format, then I want to organize photos shot the same day into directories
exiftool –ext jpg -r "-directory<${DateTimeOriginal}-%le" -d %Y%m%d 00queue
This will move them into your current directory, things that didn’t get processed stay in the queue. Now they are organized I copy them to a organized folder with the year stamp and done.
Some notes I had dealing with other files metadata that might be useful:
FOR AVI FILES HAD TO USE DateTimeOrginal INSTEAD OF CreateDate
FOR AVI FILE NEED TO USE THE OPTION ‘–ext AVI’ PROBABLY SAME FOR MP4
FOR MOV NEED CreateDate
TO DELETE A DIRECTORY RMDIR for /f %i in ('dir /a:d /s /b *NAMEOFDIRECTORYWILDCARD*') do rd /s /q %i
So here is a screenshot of what my directories look like post processing
And here is a screenshot of what is contained in a directory
And last screenshot of my organized folder, note: my 9000... directory is for raw CR2 files I like to keep.
Hope this was helpful!