Noob question - organizing pictures based on year/month/day

[EXTURSIV]

Hi all,

I recently set up a NAS and I'm trying to get my photos in order.  I have searched, but haven't found exactly what I wanted.

I have lightroom set up to organize my photos into folders like this

Pictures / Year / YYYY-MM-DD

This works well for me, but I have years of old pictures not sorted like this.  How do I make exiftool do this for me when run in a directory with pictures?  Bonus points if I can add a higher-level with the camera model (still considering this).

[StarGeek]

but I have years of old pictures not sorted like this.

Are these pictures loaded into Lightroom and LR is just not organizing them?  If that is the case then it may be that they don't have dates in which to be sorted, which would be a problem.

But otherwise, the basic command for sorting with that structure would be something like this (assuming the middle "Year" is the same as YYYY)
exiftool -d "%Y/%Y-%m-%d" "-directory</path/to/Pictures/$DateTimeOriginal" /path/to/unsorted/pictures/

Replace "/path/to/Pictures" with the path to your target Pictures directory and "/path/to/unsorted/pictures/" with the path to your unsorted pictures.  Add -r to recuse into subdirectories.

[EXTURSIV]

That's amazing.  Thanks for getting me started on this!

[sortfoldersguy]

Hello, a newbie resurrecting an old thread. Apologies, but this is the exact thread that lead me to this tool. Amazing, powerful tool, thank you.

The first time I used this to sort a large amount of photos from a camera, it took seconds, and I was amazed.

I think since then I've forgotten how exactly to do it, or I'm doing something wrong. Maybe you can help me troubleshoot?

I put in this code: exiftool -d "%Y/%Y-%m-%d" "-directory<\Pictures\$DateTimeOriginal" \Pictures\temppics\

The Pictures being my normal Pictures directory, and temppics where I put photos to be sorted when I dump them from the SD card.

Command Prompt tells me: Error: File not found - /Pictures/temppics/
    0 image files updated
    1 files weren't updated due to errors

My unsorted folders location is: C:\Users\me\Pictures\temppics
My pictures directory is: C:\Users\me\Pictures
Command prompt is working off of: C:\Users\me>


Is this something to do with permissions? I know I'm probably doing something silly, but maybe you might be able to point me in the right direction.

Windows 10 laptop. (This is a different laptop from the first time I did it successfully, I can't remember if I did it successfully on this new laptop before)

Many thanks!

[StarGeek]

For some reason, exiftool can't find the directory.  Maybe a misspelling or incorrect path?

Try using the full path (quotes needed if there's a space in the path)
exiftool -d "%Y/%Y-%m-%d" "-directory<\Pictures\$DateTimeOriginal" "C:\Users\me\Pictures\temppics"

[sortfoldersguy]

Apologies for a terribly late reply, but that worked perfectly! Well, it created a new Pictures directory on my C drive, but I think I can fix that, or I don't mind going to that directory if needs be.

It's a real time saver to sort through photos after a long time - after several months as you can see!

Thanks again