Over the years, I accumulated a lot of raw images in my pic folders, hoping later I can process those raw images. I took time lapse photos a lot, so I have a lot of raw images from time lapse shooting. Those raw image took huge space in my harddrive. I want to move all raw image out of my picture folder to a backup drive. But I have hard time to figure it out how to do this with exiftool after hours of google search. I demonstrate what I want to do below:
Move all raw images to G drive but keep folder structures. I have tens of throusands of images to move.
Original folder structure
F:\Users\id\OneDrive\Pictures\2022
\2022--06-25-1
0001.nef
0001.jpg
After move folder structure
F:\Users\id\OneDrive\Pictures\2022
\2022--06-25-1
0001.jpg
G:\nef\2022
\2022--06-25-1
0001.nef
Thanks in Advance!
I ended up using this command to move raw image files to the backup drive, not keeping exact folder structure. I still want to know how to keep the folder structure if somebody can show me how. I think most people here know nef is Nikon camera raw image file extension name.
exiftool -r -ext NEF -d %Y/%Y-%m-%d "-directory<g:\nef\$CreateDate" .
I just tested on one directory, it works like this:
test folder:
F:\Users\fuyan\OneDrive\Pictures\Timelapse\2017 Timelapse\2017-10-27 night1
new folder created and nef image files moved to:
G:\nef\2017\2017-10-27
Not exactly what I want, but it serves 75% of my purpose.
Again I still want to learn how to move files to another location and keep the folder structure.
Thanks!
Given the directory structure you posted first, as it appeared to be based upon the date, your second post command would have been what I was going to recommend.
But if the directory structure is different, then you'd want to use the %d token, altered as shown under the "Advanced features" section of the -w (-TextOut) option (https://exiftool.org/exiftool_pod.html#w-EXT-or-FMT--textOut).
Something like
exiftool -ext nef -r -Directory=G:\nef\%:5d F:\Users\id\OneDrive\Pictures\
The %d would indicate the directory of the file. Adding the colon# :5 indicates you want to remove the top 5 levels of the path, changing F:\Users\id\OneDrive\Pictures\2022\2022--06-25-1\ into \2022\2022--06-25-1\. You then prepend the target location, G:\nef\
Thanks, StarGeek! I will give it a try.