PhotoSort

PhotoSort is a robust command-line tool written in Rust, designed to streamline the organization of your photo/video collections. It works by sourcing images/videos from a source directory, extracting the date from either the file name or its EXIF/metadata data, and then moving or copying the file to a target directory.

PhotoSort solves the problem of having pictures/videos from different cameras and devices that use different naming conventions to name created files. When viewing the photos/videos in a file browser this can be confusing, as the photos/videos are not sorted by date. PhotoSort solves this problem by renaming images/videos based on their EXIF/metadata data or file name, unifying the naming convention and making to go through the photos/videos by date.

The documentation can be found here: https://docs.rs/photo_sort

Features

• Custom Target Format: You can define your own target date and file name formats for the renamed files.
• Analysis Mode: Choose how you want to extract the date from your files. Only EXIF, only name, or a combination.
• Move Mode: Choose how you want to move the files to the target directory. Options are moving, coping, hardlinking, symlinking, or relative symlinking.
• Recursive Source Directory: PhotoSort can search the source directories recursively.
• Dry Run Mode: Test the tool without making any changes to your files. The tool will print the actions it would take without actually executing them.
• Sort photos and videos: PhotoSort can sort both photos and videos by their metadata.

Usage

To use PhotoSort, you need to pass in a set of arguments to define how you want to sort your photos. Here is an example:

photo_sort \
  --source_dir /path/to/photos \
  --target_dir /path/to/sorted_photos

This command will sort the photos in the /path/to/photos directory, rename them based on their EXIF data or name and then move them to the /path/to/sorted_photos directory.

Another example:

photo_sort \
  --source_dir /path/to/photos \
  --recursive \
  --target_dir /path/to/sorted_photos \
  --analysis-mode "exif_then_name" \
  --date-format "%Y-%m-%d-_%H%M%S" \
  --file-format "{:date}{:?dup}" \
  --extensions "png,jpg" \
  --move-mode "hardlink"

This command will sort the photos in the /path/to/photos directory and its subdirectories, rename them based on their EXIF date (if not found then its name) and then hardlink them to the /path/to/sorted_photos directory. The files will be renamed to the format YYYY-MM-DD_HHMMSS[_##], only .png and .jpg files will be processed.

For a full list of available options, run photo_sort --help:

$ photo_sort --help

A tool to rename and sort photos by its EXIF date. It tries to extract the date
from the EXIF data or file name and renames the image file according to a given
format string.

Foreach source directory all images are processed and renamed to the target directory

Usage: photo_sort [OPTIONS] --source-dir <SOURCE_DIR>... --target-dir <TARGET_DIR>

Options:
  -s, --source-dir <SOURCE_DIR>...     The source directory to read the photos from
  -t, --target-dir <TARGET_DIR>        The target directory to write the sorted photos to
  -r, --recursive                      Whether to search the source directories recursively. If the flag is not set only immediate children of the source directories are considered
      --date-format <DATE_FORMAT>      Date format string to use for the target directory. The format string is passed to the `chrono` crate's `format` method [default: %Y%m%d-%H%M%S]
  -f, --file-format <FILE_FORMAT>      The target file format. {:date} is replaced with the date and {:name} with the original file name. {:dup} is replaced with a number if the file already exists. {:date} is replaced with the date and {:name} with the original file name. {:?dup} is replaced with _{:dup} if the file already exists [default: IMG_{:date}_{:name}{:?dup}]
  -e, --extensions [<EXTENSIONS>...]   A comma separated list of file extensions to include in the analysis [default: jpg,jpeg,png,tiff,heif,heic,avif,webp]
  -a, --analysis-mode <ANALYSIS_MODE>  The sorting mode, possible values are name_then_exif, exif_then_name, only_name, only_exif. Name analysis tries to extract the date from the file name, Exif analysis tries to extract the date from the EXIF data [default: exif_then_name]
  -m, --move-mode <MOVE_MODE>          The action mode, possible values are move, copy, hardlink, relative_symlink, absolute_symlink. Move will move the files, Copy will copy the files, Hardlink (alias: hard) will create hardlinks, RelativeSymlink (alias: relsym) will create relative symlinks, AbsoluteSymlink (alias: abssym) will create absolute symlinks [default: move]
  -n, --dry-run                        Dry-run If set, the tool will not move any files but only print the actions it would take
  -v, --verbose                        Be verbose, if set, the tool will print more information about the actions it takes. Setting the RUST_LOG env var overrides this flag
  -d, --debug                          Debug, if set, the tool will print debug information (including debug implies setting verbose). Setting the RUST_LOG env var overrides this flag
  -h, --help                           Print help
  -V, --version                        Print version        
  
When building with video support enabled (see below):
      --video-extensions [<VIDEO_EXTENSIONS>...]  A comma separated list of video extensions to include in the analysis [default: mp4,mov,avi]                                                                                                                                                                 

Installation

To install PhotoSort, you need to have Cargo installed on your system.

cargo install photo_sort

or

git clone https://github.com/0xCCF4/photo_sort.git
cd photo_sort
cargo install --path .

The photo_sort binary will then be available.

For using the video sorting feature follow the instructions on https://crates.io/crates/ffmpeg-next and respective their wiki https://github.com/zmwangx/rust-ffmpeg/wiki/Notes-on-building. After installing the dependencies, you can install the photo_sort binary with the video feature enabled:

cargo install --features video photo_sort

or

git clone https://github.com/0xCCF4/photo_sort.git
cd photo_sort
cargo install --features video --path .

Contributing

Contributions to PhotoSort are welcome! If you have a feature request, bug report, or want to contribute to the code, please open an issue or a pull request.

License

PhotoSort is licensed under the GPLv3 license. See the LICENSE file for more details.