Media Organizer

Organizes media files from a given directory into defined destinations using a directory tree structure by dates.

Let's imagine you have a folder with some media items like:

$ tree /media-to-sort
 media-to-sort
 ├── images
 │  ├── camera
 │  │  └── camera-001.jpg
 │  └── whatsapp-images
 │     └── IMG-20200407-WA0004.jpg
 └── videos
    └── 20200829_205420.mp4

By running this project like:

./the-media-organizer --media-src /media-to-sort --photos-dst /my-photos --videos-dst /my-videos

The files will be sorted as:

$ tree /
 /
 ├── my-photos
 │   ├── 2019
 │   │  └── 01 - January
 │   │     └── camera-001.jpg
 │   └── 2020
 │      └── 04 - April
 │         └── IMG-20200407-WA0004.jpg
 └── my-videos
    └── 2020
       └── 20200829_205420.mp4

So what happened? Images where sort by year and month, the date is taken first from the exif data, if the image has no exif then it's taken from the name. Videos are organized by year, and the date is taken from the name.

Items are moved (not copied) from source to destination, and if a file with the same name already exists in the destination and error will be shown for that item and the process will continue with the next one.

Installing

You can install via cargo with:

cargo install the-media-organizer

Then just run:

the-media-organizer -h
the-media-organizer --media-src /media-to-sort --photos-dst /my-photos --videos-dst /my-videos

You can also clone the repo and run it with cargo:

the-media-organizer $ cargo run -- -h
the-media-organizer $ cargo run -- --media-src /media-to-sort --photos-dst /my-photos --videos-dst /my-videos

How do I use it and why?

My workflow is that I copy my phones camera's directory, and some other media folders like WhatsApp images or videos that I want to keep, to my laptop. I run this program to have the photos organized into my Amazon Drive sync folder, the videos are organized into another folder that's not in Amazon, then I rsync'd both into an external hard drive.

Why organize videos and photos into different folders? Because I'm cheap and Amazon gives me unlimited storage for images only.

Why make this? I wanted to learn Rust, basically. I used to organize all my media manually, it was a really good experience since I got to view everything again, but now my time is super limited and things were just piling up.

Why not just sync from the phone directly? I do have backups with Google Photos but I like my workflow, and keeping things organize in my external hard drive. I started doing things this way and I just went with it.

Media type organizers

There are 2 media type organizers, one for photos and one for videos.

Photo Organizer

It organizes photos in a 2 level directory structure where the first level is the year and the second level the month. The date is taken from the exif of the photo, if this fails or the image doesn't have exif, it tries to get the date from the name.

Taking the date from the name is just a regex over the format that WhatsApp and cameras use, which is IMG-YYYYMMDD-WAXXXX.jpg or IMG_YYYYMMDD_XXXXX.jpg.

Only the following formats are organized jpeg, jpg and JPG.

Video Organizer

It organizes videos in directories by year. The year is taken from the file name using the regex ^(?:VID[-_])?(\d{4})(\d{2})\d{2}[_-].+\.mp4$, which basically translate to VID-YYYYMMDD-whatever.mp4 where VID- is optional and - can be changed to _. Yes, it only supports mp4 (PR's are welcome if you want to change it).

Configuration

It's required that a media source directory is specified and at least one of photos or videos destination directories.

Options can be passed via command line arguments:

./the-media-organizer -h

USAGE:
    the-media-organizer [FLAGS] [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help                           Prints help information
        --no-load-default-config-file    Do not load the config file from the default location
    -V, --version                        Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -c, --config-file <FILE>        File to load configuration from. Defaults to:
                                    - Linux: /home/alice/.config/media-organizer/config.toml
                                    - Windows: C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming\adn\media-organizer\config\config.toml
                                    - Mac: /Users/Alice/Library/Application Support/dev.adn.media-organizer/config.toml
    -m, --media-src <DIRECTORY>     Source directory with media files to organize
    -p, --photos-dst <DIRECTORY>    Directory where photos will be moved and organized
    -v, --videos-dst <DIRECTORY>    Directory where videos will be moved and organized

For example:

./the-media-organizer --media-src /media-to-sort --photos-dst /my-photos --videos-dst /my-videos

Or using a TOML configuration file:

./the-media-organizer -c my-config.toml

Where my-config.toml is:

$ cat my-config.toml

media_src = '/media-to-sort'
photos_dst = '/my-photos'
videos_dst = '/my-videos'

If both command line arguments and a file are specified, the command line arguments will take precedence. Also, if no file is specified with the --config-file option, a default configuration file will try to be loaded from:

• Linux: /home/alice/.config/media-organizer/config.toml
• Windows: C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming\adn\media-organizer\config\config.toml
• Mac: /Users/Alice/Library/Application Support/dev.adn.media-organizer/config.toml

Loading the default configuration file can be disable with the --no-load-default-config-file flag.

Testing

Just run cargo test, nothing fancy here.

Contributing

PR's and issues are welcome.

Limitations

This was tailored made to fit my needs and as a learning exercise, so there are some things that are not very flexible:

• List of supported file formats per media type organizer.
• Format to get the dates from file names.
• Directory structures and names of destinations.
• It just support images and videos.