photocatalog/README.md

Effortless Photo Organizer

Just copy/hardlink photos (or video, or any other files) from one place to another, separating them in sub-directories like $ROOT/year/month/day/.

TL;DR

I use a smartphone along with Syncthing to seamlessly sync all my photos to my PC without any manual effort. However, there's a catch: I can't keep all my photos in the synced folder indefinitely. If I clear my phone's memory, the photos on my PC get deleted as well. To avoid this, I need to remember to copy the files to another location before cleaning up my phone.

Simply dumping all my photos into one folder isn't a solution either — finding anything later would be a nightmare, and a folder with thousands of unsorted photos is far from ideal.

To address these issues, I created this tool in just one evening. Its primary purpose is to copy (or create hardlinks for) files from one location to another, while organizing them into a simple, date-based directory structure.

This tool was built for personal use and has been serving me well for quite some time without any problems. However, if you encounter any issues, feel free to report them — I’d be happy to help.

Installing

go install github.com/derfenix/photocatalog/v2@latest

Optionally you could copy created binary from the GO's bin path to system or user $PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin/.

sudo cp ${GOPATH}/bin/photocatalog /usr/local/bin/photocatalog

Migrating from v0.*

TODO

Organization modes

Next organization modes supported:

• copy — copy files to target root. Make COW (using syscall) if FS supports it.
• hardlink — create hardlink to the source file instead of copying. The best choice if source and target are in same partition for compatibility and resource usage, but we can't chmod target files, because of original file mode will be changed too.
• move — moves original files to new place.
• symlink — create a symlink at the target for the source files.

Supported formats

At this moment supported jpeg and tiff files with filled exif data and any other files but with names matching pattern yyymmdd_HHMMSS.ext with optional suffixes after a timestamp. Such names format applied by the Android's camera software (I guess all cams use this format, fix me if I'm wrong).

Jpeg/Tiff files without modification date if exif will be fallen back to the name parsing.

No able to change names format without modifying source code for now. Just because I have reasons to believe that this format is the most popular for the application use cases. But let me know if you need different timestamp formats support.

Usage

One-shot

Copy files

photocalog -mode copy -target ./photos/ -source ./sync/photos/

Create hardlinks

photocalog -mode hardlink -target ./photos/ -source ./sync/photos/

or

photocalog -target ./photos/ -source ./sync/photos/*

Watch mode

Copy files

photocalog -mode copy -target ./photos -watch -source ./sync/photos/

Create hardlinks

photocalog -mode hardlink -target ./photos/ -watch -source ./sync/photos/

or

photocalog -target ./photos/ -watch -source ./sync/photos/

Install and run monitor service

Systemd

sh ./init/install_service.sh systemd

This command will install unit file, create stub for its config and open editor to allow you edit configuration. Config file stored at $HOME/.config/photocatalog.

Then enable and start service

systemctl --user enable --now photocatalog

That's all. Now, if any file will be placed in directory, specified as MONITOR in config file, this file will be copied or hardlinked into the target dir under corresponding sub-dir.

FAQ

Why this tool was created if there is awesome XXX tool?

I had two good reasons:

1. I wish
2. I can