Organise image files into year/month folders

Question

I use MS OneDrive to sync photos taken on my Android phone to my Mac (they are synced to ~/OneDrive/Photos/Camera Roll). I would like to move the synced files into folders organised by Year and Month (Year/Month) that the photo was taken (or simply the file creation date).

Ideally this process would run whenever new photos are added to the Camera Roll folder.

I took a look at Automator Folder Actions, but it seems limited to only doing the exact same thing to everything that gets added to the folder (e.g. move all new items into a specific folder).

I found a PowerShell script that does exactly this in Windows, but haven't found any corresponding scripts or free apps that do this in macos.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I found Organize - an open source and free of charge command line tool designed to do exactly this sort of thing.

The following config does the trick:

rules:
  # Move photos into Year/Month folders in My Photos
  - folders: ~/OneDrive/Pictures/Camera Roll
    filters:
    - extension: jpg
    - created
    actions:
     - move: ~/Pictures/My Photos/{created.year}/{created.month:02}/

I then created an Automator Folder Action that will Run a Shell Script anytime a file is added to the OneDrive Camera Roll:

/usr/local/bin/organize run --config-file=~/OneDrivePhotoSync.yaml

Answer 2

You could use the folder actions to run a bash script like this:

#!/bin/bash

DIR="/Users/USERNAME/OneDrive/Photos/Camera Roll"
target=$DIR
cd "$DIR" || exit

for file in *; do
    # Top year folder name
    year=$(stat -c "%y" "$file" | awk '{print substr($0,0,4)}')
    # Secondary folder name
    subfolderName=$(stat -c "%y" "$file" | awk '{print substr($0,6,2)}')

    if [ ! -d "$target/$year" ]; then
        mkdir "$target/$year"
        echo "starting new year: $year"
    fi
    if [ ! -d "$target/$year/$subfolderName" ]; then
        mkdir "$target/$year/$subfolderName"
        echo "starting new day & month folder: $subfolderName"
    fi
    echo "moving file $file"
    mv "$file" "$target/$year/$subfolderName"

done

You can also modify the directory names to include the day or the year and the month by changing the selected substring in the substr command.

Answer 3

As of this date, found an old (OS X 10.8) but very simple and straightforward donationware GUI app that does it and is still available, and at least still opens on everything at least up through Monterey: DateTree (https://www.orange-carb.org/DateTree/downloads.html). Right now I have it running on a folder of about 10,000 files on my old El Cap machine and it's fairly slow but seems to be working exactly as advertised. No configuration needed, no muss, no fuss. I might send the author a little donation.

It does copy the files, not move them, but that's not a problem, I can delete the source folder afterwards. It also can use dates embedded in EXIF data, if you need that, although I don't. And it functions as a droplet... if you just drop a folder of files on it it'll remember the default settings from last time.

It even gives you a window reporting the copy results, although you have to look in the menus to see it's there, it's not obvious.

Not too shabby, I think.

I have no association with DateTree, just found it while searching because I'm having this same problem and don't want to mess with a bunch of hinky python, ruby, broken installers and strange errors, etc.