Re: photo management and camera download by date

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>]

On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 11:19:01AM +0200, jmt wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 May 2006 04:09, Richard Otte wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I would like to download photos off of my digital camera in such a way
> > that they are sorted into directories by date.  So a photo taken on
> > Feb 23,2006 would be put in a directory 2006/02/23/filename.  The
> > camera will often have photos taken on different dates, and I'd like
> > the directories to be created and the photos to be organized into
> > these directories automatically.  Does anyone know of a program that
> > will do this?
> >
> > I very briefly looked at digikam, but it looks as if it downloads all
> > the photos into an album, and the photos are not downloaded according
> > to date.  It looks as if I could make a digikam album for each date,
> > and then manually download photos to the different albums, but this
> > takes a fair amount of work if there are lots of photos taken on
> > different dates.
> >
> > Any suggestions are appreciated.  Thanks,
> >
> > Ric
> 
> Date encoding is manufacturer dependent, if not camera dependant. I never 
> heard of a program that could do what you expect.

The digital cameras I have used all set the timestamp of the image
file according to the date/time the photo was taken. If you copy
them off the camera media with a 'cp -p' the date should be preserved.

The problem is then no longer peculiar to cameras/images, and reduces
to a simple 'how can I sort  a bunch of files into directories by date'.

You will need a command that will convert a file to a directory name
based on the files datastamp and the directory nameing scheme you want
to use - you may need to write that depending on how you want the
directories named. Something simple like "images-YYYY-MM-DD" could
be done with 'ls' and a filter.

After that it is a fairly simple script.

If you are using a dedicated application to download images via USB or
some other interface, then this depends of the timestamp being correctly
preserved on the resulting image files. But any applicaiton that didn't
do this would be crazy..

And if you want to do this in a GUI, then you are limited to what
the application writer thought to privide, and I am not aware of
anything that does it (but then I don't use a GUI app to manage
my camera...)

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                          digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com