I have a smartphone, I have a Syncthing ~~uugh... SmartThing~~ and all photos from smartphone nicely synced to my PC without my attention. But I can't just keep all photos in synced folder: if I'll clean my phone memory — all photos from pc will be cleaned too. I need to not forget copy files in another place before cleaning phone's memory. Also, I can't just drop all photos in one dir — I will not find anything there later, and a folder with thousands photos looks like a bad idea from either side. So I create this tool in one evening. All it does — copy (or create hardlinks for) files from one place to another, creating basic date-aware directories structure for that files.

Created for own usage and used for a long time without any troubles. But if you meet some — you are welcomed to the issues.

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/

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/

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:

I wish
I can