Automatically sort pictures based on the date they were taken

Luis Ardila — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 21:18:10 GMT

I have been a linux user almost exclusively for at least 4 years, mainly using ubuntu. One of the things I particularly liked was the way the default tool for importing pictures (Shotwell) manages the files and organize them depending on the date they were taken.

Shotwell will create an arrange of folders starting by the year, then the month and then the individual days, then put the corresponding pictures inside. As much as I liked this system, I always found myself wanting to organize then in a different way, where I could quickly look at a wider range of images, for example by year, but still be able to tell from the date and a short description the contents without opening the folder.

My ideal organization is a folder with the year, then inside the pictures organized by day, but still in the folder name I would like the whole date before a short description I will add later. Therefore having for example 2016/2016-01-17_KA-Snow/.

Another reason why I decided to search for a script to organize my pictures is because Shotwell started creating many small thumbnail files of the raw files inside the pictures folders and they were really annoying me, as much as I created another script to eliminate those thumbnails from Shotwell. Also, the performance when loading pictures from the camera to import wasn't the best, most of the time taking a great amount of time just to display how many pictures were available for importing.

For the previous mentioned reasons, I searched online first and found this code, which does part of the job I wanted, then I modified it and here is the code I am using now every time I connect my camera and would like to import the pictures.

To notice is that I added command line options -s and -d for source and destination paths respectively, so that I could organize different folders I already have. And finally I also added the raw file extension of my camera ".RW2". I still need to include support for the video files, which I still need to copy by hand.

sort.sh

#!/bin/bash

# defaults
source=/media/luisardila/5FC6-EB2A/DCIM/
destination=/home/luisardila/Pictures/2016/

# Goes through all jpeg files in source directory, grabs date from each
# and sorts them into destination folder in directories according to the date
# additionally it copies as well raw files with the same name as the jpeg
# (C) Luis Ardila 2016 <luis.ardila@bozica.co>

# Getting options from the commad line
while getopts ":s:d:" opt; do
        case $opt in
        s)   # source
                source=$OPTARG
                ;;
        d)   #destination
                destination=$OPTARG
                ;;
        \?)
                echo "Invalid option: -"$OPTARG"" >&2
                exit
                ;;
        :)
                echo "Option -"$OPTARG" requires an argument" >&2
                exit
                ;;
        esac
done
i=0
# Executing move of files
for file in $source*.jpg $source**/*.jpg $source*.JPG $source**/*.JPG # CAPS
do
        echo $file
        if test -e "$file"; then
                datepath="$(identify -verbose "${file}" | grep DateTimeOri | awk '{print $2 }' | sed s%:%-%g)"
                if [[ "${datepath}" == "" ]]; then
                        year="$(identify -verbose "${file}" | grep date:modify | awk '{print $2 }' | awk -F '[-]' '{print $1}')"
                        datepath="${year}_Random"
                fi
                if ! test -e "${destination}${datepath}"; then
                        mkdir -pv "${destination}${datepath}"
                fi
                mv -v "${file}" "${destination}${datepath}"
                rawfile=$(echo ${file} | sed 's/.JPG/.RW2/g')
                if test -e "$rawfile"; then
                   mv -v "${rawfile}" "${destination}${datepath}"
                fi
        i=$(( $i + 1  ))
        fi
        echo "moved $i files"
done

If you would like also to eliminate those annoying Shotwell thumbnails, here is what I do:

rmShotwell.sh

#!/bin/bash

find . -name "*shotwell*" -delete

Installing HandBrake to cut videos in linux

Luis Ardila — Thu, 08 May 2014 21:47:29 GMT

Looking on the web for a quick and easy way to turn a video 90 degrees using the terminal I found HandBrake.

following this forum this is how I installed it:

there are two official HandBrake PPAs, ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases and ppa:stebbins/handbrake-snapshots. The former contains stable releases, which are updated about once a year. These releases tend to be rather out-dated when their end-of-life is approaching. The current stable version (0.9.8) was released on 2012-07-18. The latter contains nightly builds, which are updated daily (or nightly, as it were). These are of course less stable, and undocumented to boot, but they are good software nonetheless. Additionally, as the stable release ages, the developers tend to start recommending users to try the nightly builds instead.

To add one of these to your sources, simply run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-snapshots

depending on which you want.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

Alternatively, if you would prefer the CLI over the GUI, replace the last line with:

apt-get install handbrake-cli

Now, how to rotate a video 90 degress using HandBreak?

HandBrakeCLI -i /home/luisardila/Desktop/Comm/Luis.mp4 -o /home/luisardila/Desktop/Comm/Luis_90.mp4 --rotate=4

Bozica (Posts about linux)

Automatically sort pictures based on the date they were taken

sort.sh

rmShotwell.sh

Installing HandBrake to cut videos in linux