photo_reorganize aims to create a "shadow" directory structure to organize, by date, all the original photos detected in your macOS Photos Library.
It does this by crawling an input directory (e.g. the entire Apple Photos Library) on disk, extracting photo creation dates using exiftool, then creating a folder-per-day output directory structure where each photo is a hardlink to the original photo in the source directory.
In other words:
out/
2020-02-03/
59DAC689.jpeg ==> hardlink to original
59DAC690.jpeg ==> hardlink to original
59DAC691.jpeg ==> hardlink to original
2020-02-06/
5EECC719.jpeg ==> hardlink to original
etc...
This approach does not duplicate any files and thus doesn't waste disk space.
This is especially useful for the author, as it lets me mirror my entire photostream (which gets full-resolution photos from my phone through iCloud) onto a NAS, organized by date, using nothing more than rsync.
Every week, I simply run photo_reorganize then rsync the resulting dir to upload newly-added files to the NAS.
usage: photo_reorganize.py [-h] [--dir DIR] [--outdir OUTDIR]
photo_reorganize aims to create a "shadow" directory structure to organize, by
date, all the original photos detected in your macOS Photos Library. It does
this by crawling an input directory (e.g. the entire Apple Photos Library) on
disk, extracting photo creation dates from EXIF data, then creating a folder-
per-day output directory structure where each photo is a hardlink to the
original photo in the source directory.
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--dir DIR input directory (e.g. Photos Library originals)
--outdir OUTDIR output directory