Problem moving images

[Advocate]

Hi,

Whilst following the advice given in this thread on a test folder full of over 8000 files I have encountered a problem.

I followed the advice given and typed the following command

exiftool '-directory</Volumes/Photos/exiftool_test/$datetimeoriginal' -d "%Y_%m_%d" -r /Volumes/Photos/Exported

...and it seemed to begin to run without problem, with a lot of scrolling messages about files with no exif data, but monitoring the output directory I could see that folders were being created with the correct naming scheme and pictures were indeed appearing in them.

After a while however I noticed that the error messages had changed to...

Code Select Expand

Warning: Error opening file - /Volumes/Photos/Exported/.__MG_6329.CR2
Error: File not found - /Volumes/Photos/Exported/.__MG_6329.CR2

...and when I looked in the source directory the images were disappearing just as fast as the error messages were scrolling along, without subsequently reappearing in the destination directory.

Thinking there may have been a problem copying the files originally for the test I halted the process and tried opening one of the remaining files, which opened without problem.  So I re-ran the command, and again my files started disappearing with the same error messages.
The only discrepancy I can see is that exiftool is saying it can't find a file called .__MG_6329.CR2 whilst the file (I assume) it is referencing and subsequently deleting is actually called _MG_6329.CR2

Can anyone shed any light on what is going on?

Thanks in advance,

Alistair

[Advocate]

So, after a little bit more digging it turns out the images are in fact being moved appropriately, with their original file names.  Still can't figure out why I'm getting these error messages though.

[EDIT] OMG I feel so stupid.  It turns out these files ARE in fact all in that directory but of course MacOS doesn't list files that start with a period with the ls command.  After typing ls .* into the terminal there they are!  Now I just need to figure out WHAT they are[/EDIT]

[StarGeek]

They're MacOS sidecar files.  Support for them was added with ver 12.08.  Beyond that, you'll have to wait for a Mac user to chime in.

[Phil Harvey]

These files contain the MacOS system attributes for files on filesystems that don't support these natively.  You can safely ignore/delete all these files unless you are doing something like using the MacOS comments or tags or some such stupidity.

- Phil

[Alan Clifford]

[EDIT] OMG I feel so stupid.  It turns out these files ARE in fact all in that directory but of course MacOS doesn't list files that start with a period with the ls command.  After typing ls .* into the terminal there they are!  Now I just need to figure out WHAT they are[/EDIT]

ls -a

is useful to see everything.