Not wanting to open Lightroom, Darktable or other photo library apps to simply import/copy photos from my camera's memory card, I wrote a script to fetch photos' date-taken time stamp and copy them into a date-labelled folder structure:
photoName.cr2
โ YYYY/MM-DD
โ 2020/10-01/photoName.cr2
![notion image](https://www.notion.so/image/https%3A%2F%2Ffile.notion.so%2Ff%2Ff%2F9fcd4f23-a447-431a-87ca-4fd9a25617e9%2Fab5304a9-9c57-434f-9e3c-b27b83be2369%2FneatPhotoImport_fileExplorer.png%3Fid%3De010f787-10fb-419c-908e-b1d599cb624b%26table%3Dblock%26spaceId%3D9fcd4f23-a447-431a-87ca-4fd9a25617e9%26expirationTimestamp%3D1722016800000%26signature%3D6Fyl1zDJaRhH25mMRfiwU329ty-V8-QtOLivoW71VKM?table=block&id=e010f787-10fb-419c-908e-b1d599cb624b&cache=v2)
This admittedly simple task ended up also helping with re-organizing messy photo folders and turned out to be an interesting journey through the exiftool docs, running Python subprocesses and dealing with character encodings.
I hope this little app will be useful to some who want to organize their photos by date or those who are wondering why filenames with unicode characters are such a pain on windows ๐คจ ...
Find it on GitLab here
![There's no GUI (yet) but the --interactive mode asks for required input(s) and shows progress](https://www.notion.so/image/https%3A%2F%2Ffile.notion.so%2Ff%2Ff%2F9fcd4f23-a447-431a-87ca-4fd9a25617e9%2F979c18ac-d3ea-4ffe-9178-8f2bee9fff45%2FneatPhotoImport_example.png%3Fid%3Df61d22b0-bc8e-4941-a0f1-5b3f62251e25%26table%3Dblock%26spaceId%3D9fcd4f23-a447-431a-87ca-4fd9a25617e9%26expirationTimestamp%3D1722016800000%26signature%3DOSQKYm462gVp3iqOsMQLdotCbrFVOoWVPY8eWLU3EdQ?table=block&id=f61d22b0-bc8e-4941-a0f1-5b3f62251e25&cache=v2)
--interactive
mode asks for required input(s) and shows progressNaturally I keep finding small nice-to-have things that I want to add (see the "roadmap" section in the README on GitLab ๐) without it turning into a big, bloaty app. So there may be updates on the process here some time in the future. Feel free to suggest more features.