Sorting Digital Photos

Normally I collect all my photos in iPhoto on my desktop iMac. That is a problem when travelling, then I use an iPod or my MacBook. At some point I ran out of disk space on my desktop. Which is a major problem with iPhoto, as it stores all photos in one big directory on a single volume.

So I ended up with multiple directories on multiple volumes containing thousands of photos.

What to do?

Group By Date

Grouping photos by date is a very logical way of organising photos.
As the date is not necessarily the creation date of the photo, we have to look at the DateTaken in the Exif information. This date is written into the photo at the moment the photo is taken.

Grouping by date calls for a very simple directory structure:

year / month / day / myphoto.jpg

Removing Duplicates

My script moves the photos to the above hierarchy, and while doing so tryes to find duplicate photos and delete them. It does so by checking all photos with the same name against their md5 checksum.

When the checksum is the same, we can safely assume that the photo is the same.

When copying a batch of photos, the script will first add a file using the md5 checksum as the filename. This prevents creation of multiple copies of the same photo. After copying all photos into the hierarchy, the script will rename the photo to its original name.

Duplicate File Names

Of course, you can have two photos, taken on the same day, with the same filename. This happens when you make an excessive amount of photos, or when you use two cameras with the same numbering scheme.

I solve this by prefixing the photo name with the last three digits of the serial number of the camera. When this results in two different photos of with the same name (from probably the same camera) then the filenames will have an added '-1', '-2' etc.

Prefixing the file with (part of) the serial number of your camera makes it also easier to do a batch processing for correction on a per-camera basis. For example when you want to correct the exif date or time (cameras that are not on time is very common when you cross time zones...).

Creation Date of the Photo Files

After copying and renaming the photo to its final destination, the script will set the modification date and time of the photo file to the date and time found in the Exif information of the photo.

This will help finding photos with the normal file search, and also make it easy to sort photos by the time taken.

Mac OS X Droplet

I also made a very simple Mac OS X droplet. Just mount your camera, drop the directory with files on the droplet, and all your photos are safely copied to the directory of your choice.

You will need to edit the scriplet, as I didn't make any configuration options.