photoren

photoren is a small command-line program for rename and organize my digital photograph files based on the time they were taken. It also renames any corresponding GQview metadata files, and can generate a shell script to reproduce the renaming and sorting on a backup copy of the files.

I wrote photoren in 2007-06 to help tidy up my photo archive. My archive was over 50GB, containing over 25,000 images and 16,000 metadata files. (It would've been bigger, except I'd just culled around 5,000 images.) Incidentally, the initial run of photoren on this archive took 45 minutes.

Executing photoren --help shows the command line syntax and options:

usage: photoren { OPTION }* { FILE }+

options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -n, --dry-run         Do not rename or move any files, but say a close
                        approximation of what would be done.
  -r, --recursive       Descend recursively into subdirectories, processing
                        the contents of each subdirectory.
  -d DIR, --archive-directory=DIR
                        Move renamed files to archive directory DIR.  Files
                        will be organized into a tree of subdirectories for
                        year and month.  For example, if DIR is "/foo", then a
                        file named "20070704-123456.jpg" would be moved to
                        under the directory "/foo/2007/07/".
  -q DIR, --gqview-metadata=DIR
                        Also move GQview metadata files under directory DIR.
                        Set DIR to empty string to disable this feature.
                        Default: ".gqview/metadata" under home directory
  -s FILE, --script=FILE
                        Write a shell script to reproduce approximately the
                        actions of this program.  This is useful for updating
                        a remote rsync backup, for example.

I'm releasing photoren in case anyone else gets some use out of it. Please note that I haven't put much time into quality assurance for this program, and that you use it at your own risk. You probably shouldn't use this program unless you're comfortable with Unix administration and Python. And I'll note here that photoren is the first chunk of Python code I've written...

You can download file photoren, version 0.1 (2007-06-30).