Exif categorize

excat.py is a simple script to move JPEG files into directories depending on Exif tag values. Currently it's mostly hardcoded to do a very specific task (see Why bother? section).

rmsmall.py is a script to separate small JPEGs (in terms of the picture size) into a separate directory. Currently the minimal dimensions and target directory are hardcoded (files with at least one of the dimensions smaller than 600px end up in ./small/ dir).

Upcoming features

For excat.py:

• move files into subdirectories
• accept --dry-run option to display actions instead of moving files
• accept exif tag names after --tag option
• aliases for some tags (eg. model for Exif.Image.Model, time for Exif.Image.DateTime)
• accept --stats option to view the number of files per each tag value
• accept --min option to move the files only if there is more of them than n for a certain tag value

For rmsmall.py:

• setting minimal dimensions
• setting target directory

Why bother?

I was asked to recover some holiday photos from a broken harddisk. After ddrescue/photorec procedure I ended up with 20 thousand JPEGs, including system files, screenshots and unrelated pictures.

Sorting the images by model of the camera it was taken with seemed to be a reasonable thing to do. I would then see what sticks - review the contents of the files starting with a camera that made the biggest number of photos. After finding the winner I could also sort the files by dates...

So there, I fired up the python interpreter, found pyexiv2 module and started tinkering.

Notes

I've found [fdupes]{https://code.google.com/p/fdupes/} useful for removing duplicates before processing the images with rmsmall.py and excat.py.