Edit

After a long process of roaming the web, re-runs and troubleshoot the script with this wonderful community, the script is functional and does what it’s intended to do. The script itself is probably even further improvable in terms of efficiency/logic, but I lack the necessary skills/knowledge to do so, feel free to copy, edit or even propose a more efficient way of doing the same thing.

I’m greatly thankful to @AernaLingus@hexbear.net, @GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org, @hydroptic@sopuli.xyz and Phil Harvey (exiftool) for their help, time and all the great idea’s (and spoon-feeding me with simple and comprehensive examples ! )

How to use

Prerequisites:

  • parallel package installed on your distribution

Copy/past the below script in a file and make it executable. Change the start_range/end_range to your needs and install the parallel package depending on your OS and run the following command:

time find /path/to/your/image/directory/ -type f | parallel ./script-name.sh

This will order only the pictures from your specified time range into the following structure YEAR/MONTH in your current directory from 5 different time tag/timestamps (DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate, FileModifyDate, ModifyDate, DateAcquired).

You may want to swap ModifyDate and FileModifyDate in the script, because ModifyDate is more accurate in a sense that FileModifyDate is easily changeable (as soon as you make some modification to the pictures, this will change to your current date). I needed that order for my specific use case.

From: '-directory<$DateAcquired/' '-directory<$ModifyDate/' '-directory<$FileModifyDate/' '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/'

To: '-directory<$DateAcquired/' '-directory<$FileModifyDate/' '-directory<$ModifyDate/' '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/'

As per exfitool’s documentation:

ExifTool evaluates the command-line arguments left to right, and latter assignments to the same tag override earlier ones.

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <filename>"
    exit 1
fi

# Concatenate all arguments into one string for the filename, so calling "./script.sh /path/with spaces.jpg" should work without quoting
filename="$*"

start_range=20170101
end_range=20201230

FIRST_DATE=$(exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal -CreateDate -FileModifyDate -DateAcquired -ModifyDate "$filename" | tr -d '-' | awk '{print $1}')

if [[ "$FIRST_DATE" != '' ]] && [[ "$FIRST_DATE" -gt $start_range ]] && [[ "$FIRST_DATE" -lt $end_range ]]; then
        exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -d %Y/%B '-directory<$DateAcquired/' '-directory<$ModifyDate/' '-directory<$FileModifyDate/' '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"

else
        echo "Not in the specified time range"

fi

Hi everyone !

Please no bash-shaming, I did my outmost best to somehow put everything together and make it somehow work without any prior bash programming knowledge. It took me a lot of effort and time.

While I’m pretty happy with the result, I find the execution time very slow: 16min for 2288 files.

On a big folder with approximately 50,062 files, this would take over 6 hours !!!

If someone could have a look and give me some easy to understand hints, I would greatly appreciate it.

What Am I trying to achieve ?

Create a bash script that use exiftool to stripe the date from images in a readable format (20240101) and compare it with an end_range to order only images from that specific date range (ex: 2020-01-01 -> 2020-12-30).

Also, some images lost some EXIF data, so I have to loop through specific time fields:

  • DateTimeOriginal
  • CreateDate
  • FileModifyDate
  • DateAcquired

The script in question

#!/bin/bash

shopt -s globstar

folder_name=/home/user/Pictures
start_range=20170101
end_range=20180130


for filename in $folder_name/**/*; do

	if [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
		DateTimeOriginal=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal "$filename")
	        if  [ "$DateTimeOriginal" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$DateTimeOriginal" -lt $end_range ]; then
			/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
			echo "Found a value"
		echo "Okay its $(tput setab 22)DateTimeOriginal$(tput sgr0)"

		fi

        elif [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -CreateDate "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                CreateDate=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -CreateDate "$filename")
                if  [ "$CreateDate" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$CreateDate" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 27)CreateDate$(tput sgr0)"
                fi

        elif [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -FileModifyDate "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                FileModifyDate=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -FileModifyDate "$filename")
                if  [ "$FileModifyDate" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$FileModifyDate" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$FileModifyDate/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 202)FileModifyDate$(tput sgr0)"
                fi


        elif [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateAcquired "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                DateAcquired=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateAcquired "$filename")
                if  [ "$DateAcquired" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$DateAcquired" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$DateAcquired/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 172)DateAcquired(tput sgr0)"
                fi

        elif [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -ModifyDate "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                ModifyDate=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -ModifyDate "$filename")
                if  [ "$ModifyDate" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$ModifyDate" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$ModifyDate/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 135)ModifyDate(tput sgr0)"
                fi

        else
                echo "No EXIF field found"

done

Things I have tried

  1. Reducing the number of if calls

But it didn’t much improve the execution time (maybe a few ms?). The syntax looks way less readable but what I did, was to add a lot of or ( || ) in the syntax to reduce to a single if call. It’s not finished, I just gave it a test drive with 2 EXIF fields (DateTimeOriginal and CreateDate) to see if it could somehow improve time. But meeeh :/.

#!/bin/bash

shopt -s globstar

folder_name=/home/user/Pictures
start_range=20170101
end_range=20201230

for filename in $folder_name/**/*; do

        if [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]] || [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -CreateDate "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                DateTimeOriginal=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal "$filename")
		CreateDate=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -CreateDate "$filename")
                if  [ "$DateTimeOriginal" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$DateTimeOriginal" -lt $end_range ] || [ "$CreateDate" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$CreateDate" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/' '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 22)DateTimeOriginal$(tput sgr0)"

                else
			echo "FINISH YOUR SYNTAX !!"
		fi

	fi
done
  1. Playing around with find

To recursively find my image files in all my folders I first tried the find function, but that gave me a lot of headaches… When my image file name had some spaces in it, it just broke the image path strangely… And all answers I found on the web were gibberish, and I couldn’t make it work in my script properly… Lost over 4 yours only on that specific issue !

To overcome the hurdle someone suggest to use shopt -s globstar with for filename in $folder_name/**/* and this works perfectly. But I have no idea If this could be the culprit of slow execution time?

  1. Changing all [ ] into [[ ]]

That also didn’t do the trick.

How to Improve the processing time ?

I have no Idea if it’s related to my script or the exiftool call that makes the script so slow. This isn’t that much of a complicated script, I mean, it’s a comparison between 2 integers not a hashing of complex numbers.

I hope someone could guide me in the right direction :)

Thanks !

  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    Alright, here’s what I’ve got!

    #!/usr/bin/env python3

import datetime
import glob
import os
import re
import shutil

import exiftool


files = glob.glob(r"/path/to/photos/**/*", recursive=True)
# Necessary to avoid duplicate files; if all photos have the same extension
# you could simply add that extension to the end of the glob path instead
files = [f for f in files if os.path.isfile(f)]

parent_dir = r'/path/to/sorted/photos'
start_date = datetime.datetime(2015, 1, 1)
end_date = datetime.datetime(2024, 12, 31)
date_extractor = re.compile(r'^(\d{4}):(\d{2}):(\d{2})')

with exiftool.ExifToolHelper() as et:
  metadata = et.get_metadata(files)
  for d in metadata:
    for tag in ["EXIF:DateTimeOriginal", "EXIF:CreateDate",
                "File:FileModifyDate", "EXIF:ModifyDate",
                "XMP:DateAcquired"]:
      if tag in d.keys():
        # Per file logic goes here
        year, month, day = [int(i) for i in date_extractor.match(d[tag]).group(1, 2, 3)]
        filedate = datetime.datetime(year, month, day)
        if filedate < start_date or filedate > end_date:
          break
        
        # Can uncomment below line for debugging purposes
        # print(f'{d['File:FileName']} {d[tag]} {year}/{month}')
        subdirectory = f'{parent_dir}/{year}/{month}'
        if not os.path.exists(subdirectory):
          os.makedirs(subdirectory)

        shutil.move(d['SourceFile'], subdirectory)
        
        break

    Other than PyExifTool which will need to be installed using pip, all libraries used are part of the standard library. The basic flow of the script is to first grab metadata for all files using one exiftool command, then for each file to check for the existence of the desired tags in succession. If a tag is found and it’s within the specified date range, it creates the YYYY/MM subdirectory if necessary, moves the file, and then proceeds to process the next file.

    In my preliminary testing, this seemed to work great! The filtering by date worked as expected, and when I ran it on my whole test set (831 files) it took ~6 seconds of wall time. My gut feeling is that once you’ve implemented the main optimization of handling everything with a single execution of exiftool, this script (regardless of programming language) is going to be heavily I/O bound because the logic itself is simple and the bulk of time is spent reading and moving files, meaning your drive’s speed will be the key limiting factor. Out of those 6 seconds, only half a second was actual CPU time. And it’s worth keeping in mind that I’m doing this on a speedy NVME SSD (6 GB/s sequential read/write, ~300K IOPS random read/write), so it’ll be slower on a traditional HDD.

    There might be some unnecessary complexity for some people’s taste (e.g. using the datetime type instead of simple comparisons like in your bash script), but for something like this I’d prefer it to be brittle and break if there’s unexpected behavior because I parsed something wrong or put in nonsensical inputs rather than fail silently in a way I might not even notice.

    One important caveat is that none of my photos had that XMP:DateAcquired tag, so I can’t be certain that that particular tag will work and I’m not entirely sure that will be the tag name on your photos. You may want to run this tiny script just to check the name and format of the tag to ensure that it’ll work with my script:

    #!/usr/bin/env python3

import exiftool
import glob
import os


files = glob.glob(r"/path/to/photos/**/*", recursive=True)
# Necessary to avoid duplicate files; if all photos have the same extension
# you could simply add that extension to the end of the glob path instead
files = [f for f in files if os.path.isfile(f)]
with exiftool.ExifToolHelper() as et:
  metadata = et.get_metadata(files)
  for d in metadata:
    if "XMP:DateAcquired" in d.keys():
      print(f'{d['File:FileName']} {d[tag]}')

    If you run this on a subset of your data which contains XMP-tagged files and it correctly spits out a list of files plus the date metadata which begins YYYY:MM:DD, you’re in the clear. If nothing shows up or the date format is different, I’d need to modify the script to account for that. In the former case, if you know of a specific file that does have the tag, it’d be helpful to get the exact tag name you see in the output from this script (I don’t need the whole output, just the name of the DateAcquired key):

    #!/usr/bin/env python3

import exiftool
import json


with exiftool.ExifToolHelper() as et:
  metadata = et.get_metadata([r'path/to/dateacquired/file'])
  for d in metadata:
    print(json.dumps(d, indent=4))

    If you do end up using this, I’ll be curious to know how it compares to the parallel solution! If the exiftool startup time ends up being negligible on your machine I’d expect it to be similar (since they’re both ultimately I/O bound, and parallel saves time by being able to have some threads executing while others are waiting for I/O), but if the exiftool spin-up time constitutes a significant portion of the execution time you may find it to be faster! If you don’t end up using it, no worries–it was a fun little exercise and I learned about a library that will definitely save me some time in the future if I need to do some EXIF batch processing!

    • N0x0nOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Hey again !

      Since exiftool is run in batch mode, only a single instance needs to be launched and can be reused for many queries. This is much more efficient than launching a separate process for every single query.

      WOW I’m really impressed ! It’s really, really fast xD! Sorry for the late response, I played with your python script and gave a lot of testing !

      However, after playing around with your perfectly nice written python script, there’s a problem with how the tags get processed.

          for tag in ["EXIF:DateTimeOriginal", "EXIF:CreateDate",
                "File:FileModifyDate", "EXIF:ModifyDate",
                "XMP:DateAcquired"]:

      If you print the EXIF date times for your images with exiftool -a -G1 -s -time:all /path/to/picture :

      #Picture 1

[QuickTime]     CreateDate                      : 2018:04:14 16:53:41
[QuickTime]     ModifyDate                      : 2018:04:14 16:55:04

      But sometimes the same date tag will have a different name:

      #Pictures 2

[IFD0]          ModifyDate                      : 2018:09:16 11:04:27
[ExifIFD]       DateTimeOriginal                : 2018:05:07 12:06:21
[ExifIFD]       CreateDate                      : 2018:05:07 12:06:21

      And in that case it doesn’t get processed correctly, because your python script is looking for "EXIF:CreateDate" and will fallback to "File:FileModifyDate",. ExifTool commands do not look for the tag prefix ([IFD0], [ExifIFD], [QuickTime] ) but directly the tag name (CreateDate, ModifyDate…). I have no idea how this could be implemented in your script. If you have time, you’re motivated and want to improve it, feel free :). I’m really impressed how fast it was… Like it took less than 20s for the same batch file (2200 files)!

      Thank you very much for your help and give me a glimpse of what I could achieve if I had the proper skill set !!

      Edit:

      Don’t know it could help but if you use exiftool -s -time:all /home/user/Pictures/*, this will only print the tag names.

    • N0x0nOPEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Hello again :)

      Sorry for pinging you ! But I somehow figured it out!

      with exiftool.ExifToolHelper(common_args=None) as et:
  metadata = et.get_metadata(files)
  for d in metadata:
    for tag in ["DateTimeOriginal", "CreateDate",
                "FileModifyDate", "ModifyDate",
                "DateAcquired"]:

      This seems to work as expect with only the tag names and without the need of the tag groups ([IFD0], [ExifIFD], [QuickTime]). The processing time is impressive !! Thank you !!

      However if I may ask only one last thing… Is there anyway to change the file name when the file is moved and already exists to something like

      /Pictures/sorted/2018/2/IMG_0993-1.JPG
/Pictures/sorted/2018/2/IMG_0993-2.JPG
/Pictures/sorted/2018/2/IMG_0993-3.JPG
....

      I tried to wrap my head arround os.move or os.rename but can’t make any sense out of it !

      Thank you in advance !!

      • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Wow, nice find! I was going to handle it by just arbitrarily picking the first tag which ended with CreateDate, FileModifyDate, etc., but this is a much better solution which relies on the native behavior of exiftool. I feel kind of silly for not looking at the documentation more carefully: I couldn’t find anything immediately useful when looking at the documentation for the class used in the script (ExifToolHelper) but with the benefit of hindsight I now see this crucial detail about its parameters:

        All other parameters are passed directly to the super-class constructor: exiftool.ExifTool.__init__()

        And sure enough, that’s where the common_args parameter is detailed which handles this exact use case:

        common_args (list of str*, or* None.) –

        Pass in additional parameters for the stay-open instance of exiftool.

        Defaults to ["-G", "-n"] as this is the most common use case.

        • -G (groupName level 1 enabled) separates the output with groupName:tag to disambiguate same-named tags under different groups.

        • -n (print conversion disabled) improves the speed and consistency of output, and is more machine-parsable

        Passed directly into common_args property.

        As for the renaming, you could handle this by using os.path.exists as with the directory creation and using a bit of logic (along with the utility functions os.path.basename and os.path.splitext) to generate a unique name before the move operation:

        # Ensure uniqueness of path
basename = os.path.basename(d['SourceFile'])
filename, ext = os.path.splitext(basename)
count = 1        
while os.path.exists(f'{subdirectory}/{basename}'):
  basename = f'{filename}-{count}{ext}'
  count += 1

shutil.move(d['SourceFile'], f'{subdirectory}/{basename}')
        • N0x0nOPEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Hey ha :) !!

          Wow, nice find! I was going to handle it by just arbitrarily picking the first tag which ended with CreateDate, FileModifyDate, etc., but this is a much better solution which relies on the native behavior of exiftool. I feel kind of silly for not looking at the documentation more carefully

          Yeah I know that feeling, I posted and add unnecessary noise to Phil Harvey’s forum about something I though was a “bug” or odd behavior with EXIF-tool, while it’s was just my lacking reading skills… I felt so dumb :/. Because I’m unable to build it up form the ground myself,like you did (great work, thanks again !!), I can only fiddle around and do my best reading the documentation to somehow find my way out. I was pretty happy and had a little surge of dopamine level :D !

          #Ensure uniqueness of path
basename = os.path.basename(d['SourceFile'])
...

          THAT did the trick ! Thank you. I somehow “wrote” something similar but don’t look at it, it’s nonfunctional and ugly XD but I gave it a try while roaming the web.

                  try:
          shutil.move(d['SourceFile'], subdirectory)
        except:
          i = 0
          while os.path.exists(d['SourceFile']):
            i += 1
            base_name, extension = os.path.splitext(d['SourceFile'])
            new_filename = f"{base_name}-{i}{extension}"
            print (new_filename)
            os.rename(d['SourceFile'], new_filename)
            shutil.move(new_filename, subdirectory)

          Final words

          First, your script is a bomb ! Blazing fast and does everything I wanted ! And you were right with your first impression and the -stay_open switch. That’s what PyExifTool uses under the hood (read is somewhere in the docs)! I gave it try to implement that switch with an arg file in my old/ugly/painful bash scirpt, but didn’t worked as expected. I will give it another try sometimes in the near future. Right now I’m exhausted from reading and all the re-runs to troubleshoot and test things and more than happy with your script (thanks again for everything !!!).

          Second, I hope you won’t be mad, but after a thorough re-reading of the exif-tool documentation and playing around a bit, I even managed to get exif-tool do the same thing, it looks something like this:

          exiftool -P -d %Y:%m:%d -if '$DateTimeOriginal gt "2018:01:01" and $DateTimeOriginal lt "2021:01:01"' -api QuickTimeUTC -r '-directory<${DateTimeOriginal#;DateFmt("%Y/%B")}/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' .

          In plain English this translates to:

          Scan recursively current directory, in a specific time range condition formatted to %Y:%m:%d and based on DateTimeOriginal tag. Order all images that respects the condition in a reformatted Year/month directory structure with the DateTimeOriginal tag. Rename the files incrementally if duplicate exist to filename-x+1.extension.

          This was the first command I was working on before starting to try a bash script, but It somehow messed up the folder creation, long story short: It was because of how my command formatted the date in the condition (-d %Y/%B): 2018/June gt "2018:01:01" (yeah this will cause some strange behavior xD). However, your script is faster !!! For the same batch:

          2200 files
---
Exif-Tool: 24s
PyExifTool: 11s

          Compared to my painful and ugly 11 minutes script… uuuhg !

          Again, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge, your help/time and staying with me. 👍 😁 I hope we will meet again and maybe/hopefully have a proper conversation on programming/scripting !

          Thanks 🙏.

          • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            Yeah I know that feeling, I posted and add unnecessary noise to Phil Harvey’s forum about something I though was a “bug” or odd behavior with EXIF-tool, while it’s was just my lacking reading skills… I felt so dumb :/

            Happens to the best of us! As long as you make a genuine effort to find a solution, I think most people will be happy to help regardless.

            As for the version of the unique name code you wrote, you got the spirit! The problem is that the try block will only catch the exception the first time around, so if there are two duplicates the uncaught exception will terminate the script. Separately, when working with exceptions it’s important to be mindful of which particular exceptions the code in the try block might throw and when. In this case, if the move is to another directory in the same filesystem, shutil.move will match the behavior of os.rename which throws different types of exceptions depending on what goes wrong and what operating system you’re on. Importantly, on Windows, it will throw an exception if the file exists, but this will not generally occur on Unix and the file will be overwritten silently.

            (actually, I just realized that this may be an issue with pasting in your Python code messing up the indentation–one of the flaws of Python. If this was your actual code, I think it would work:)

                    try:
          shutil.move(d['SourceFile'], subdirectory)
        except:
          i = 0
          while os.path.exists(d['SourceFile']):
            i += 1
            base_name, extension = os.path.splitext(d['SourceFile'])
            new_filename = f"{base_name}-{i}{extension}"
          print(new_filename)
          os.rename(d['SourceFile'], new_filename)
          shutil.move(new_filename, subdirectory)

            (oh, and I should have mentioned this earlier, but: for Markdown parsers that support it (including Lemmy and GitHub) if you put the name of the language you’re writing in after your opening triple ` (e.g. ```python or ```bash) it’ll give you syntax highlighting for that language (although not as complete as what you’d see in an actual code editor))

            Really cool that you figured out how to do it with exiftool natively–I’ll be honest, I probably wouldn’t have persevered enough to come up with that had it been me! Very interesting that it ended up being slower than the Python script, which I wouldn’t have expected. One thing that comes to mind is that my script more or less separates the reads and writes: first it reads all the metadata, then it moves all the files (there are also reads to check for file existence in the per-file operations, but my understanding is that this happens in compact contiguous areas of the drive and the amount of data read is tiny). If exiftool performs the entire operation for one file at a time, it might end up being slower due to how storage access works.

            Happy to have been able to help! Best of luck to you.