Sunday, December 18, 2016

Sorting out Photos Revisited

Since my last post, I’ve continued running the script to process my images and am getting close to being done.  Given that, there are a few things I would like to have done differently:

  • Right now the script organizes pictures as: <model>/<year>/<month>/<day>/<picture/video>  While that works ok, it does mean that to find a specific picture I need to know which camera model took it. I’m starting to think I should have turned that around: <year>/<month>/<day>/<model>.  At least then I would only need to know the approximate day they were taken.  However, I do like the idea of grabbing all mobile phone pics/video and being able to move them en masse.
  • Videos don’t, by default, include the camera model.  Not really sure why this is, but that does make it kind of annoying to sort out.   I have to build some strange rules/heuristics/guesses to determine which camera took what picture.  Maybe not an issue for deduping, but definitely a pain if I want to keep them separated into Mobile/Non-Mobile.
  • MacOS’s mdls command does a great job at dragging the capture date from videos, but only if the file is mounted locally on the Mac itself.  This includes FAT32 and other Windows-based file systems.  If you mount the same file system via NTFS, it gets confused.  As such, I’ve had to leave behind AVI files so I can pull them local later.  (Though, as I think of it, maybe mediainfo would work for AVI files … not sure why I didn’t try that)
  • My previous script only looks at the first conflict, meaning that once I have a single non-duplicated file, any more duplicates may be copied repeatedly.  That’s my next correction.

Overall, the process has been a bit of a pain in the back side and definitely slow, but I’m almost to the point where I have one canonical copy of all my pictures.  (Well, actually two because I’m working off my local OneDrive mirror).

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