I've been playing with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) for the past couple of days. It's an amazing distribution, way better than anything I've seen before. As a desktop distribution everything seems to run out of box. I remember how painful (yet fun) was a Linux install eight years ago, when I was spending my nights recompiling the kernel, in order to get the trivial things working (cdrom, modem, sound, video card, etc.). I've managed to set up Hardy in about an hour or so - and that includes updating the ATI drivers as well.

One of the things that I love about the Canon photo management software that came with my camera (Canon 350D) is the ability to keep the photos organised in folders, by date. Sounds very simple, but it's really one of the things that I missed most while running Linux. I've tried several photo management packages, but they either lacked this feature, or they didn't allow the user to customize the folder names. And having both a "2008_05_19" and "2008-05-20" is not an option for me. No way!

But again, one of the nice things about Linux, and Unix in general, is that you can always do the things your way. It might not be very appealing for non-technical people, but it should be quite simple for someone with a basic programming experience - and Google around.

I'll provide a simple shell script that takes a source folder, a file extension and moves all the matching files into a nice, date organised, folder structure.

The main problem is that the date when the photo was taken might not be the same as the file date. Actually, gThumb for example, saves the file with the date when the images were downloaded from the camera. This might not be a problem if you're downloading today's photos, but if you're downloading the photos from a two week trip - there's not much point in having them stored in a single folder, with the current date.

Hence, we will have to obtain the date / time when the picture was taken. Most cameras - including Canon 350D - save this information inside the EXIF tag "CreateDate". But grabbing the EXIF information from a file might not be very straightforward - and this is where exiftool comes into play.

Exiftool is a nice console application that can get/set most (if not all) EXIF tags. Even more, it's very script-friendly as you'll see in the next steps.

Having the photo creation date, the process is quite simple. We create a directory having the creation date as its name and place the photo there. Here is the complete shell script:

#!/bin/bash
 
# The directory where the photos are
SOURCE_DIR=Photos
 
# The destination directory
DEST_DIR=/media/drive_d/Photos
 
# The date pattern for the destination dir (see strftime)
DEST_DIR_PATTERN="%Y_%m_%d"
 
# Move all files having this extension
EXTENSION=cr2
 
for f in `find "$SOURCE_DIR" -iname "*.$EXTENSION" -type f`; do
	# Obtain the creation date from the EXIF tag
	f_date=`exiftool $f -CreateDate -d $DEST_DIR_PATTERN | cut -d ':' -f 2 | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//'`;
 
	# Construct and create the destination directory
	f_dest_dir=$DEST_DIR/$f_date
	if [ ! -d $f_dest_dir ]; then
		echo "Creating directory $f_dest_dir"
		mkdir $f_dest_dir
	fi
 
	mv "$f" "$f_dest_dir"
	echo "Moved $f to $f_dest_dir"
done

Before running this script, please change the variables defined in the header as required. The script should work for any image format supported by exiftool. Until now, I've only tested it with CR2 files (Canon RAW, as created by Canon 350D) - please let me know if it's not working for you.

Note: If you're using Ubuntu, you can install exiftool with the following command:

sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

Other distributions might include a similar package in their repository. You can always check the official exiftool page for the latest version.