2023-04-21
My phone places all photos into one folder & sets the filename to the date and timestamp on when the photo is taken. When I export the photos to my external storage device, I like to organize them into folders by dates. Doing this manually is very tedious, so I created a shell script that will do that very quickly for me.
To use this code:
- Save the code into a folder with the images, name it move-files.sh.
- Go into the folder from the terminal and run the script
./move-files.sh; all files should now be nicely organized into subfolders.
#!/bin/bash
if [[ $(ls | grep -E "[0-9]{8}_.*") ]]; then
for name in [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]_*.*; do
echo "$name"
new_dir=$(echo $name | sed -e 's/\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\)\([0-9][0-9]\)\([0-9][0-9]\)_\(.*\)/\1-\2-\3/g')
new_name=$(echo $name | sed -e 's/\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\)\([0-9][0-9]\)\([0-9][0-9]\)_\([0-9][0-9]\)\([0-9][0-9]\)\([0-9][0-9]\)/\1-\2-\3-\4-\5-\6/g')
echo "new dir $new_dir"
echo "new name $new_name"
mkdir -p "$new_dir"
mv -v "$name" "$new_dir/$new_name"
done
else
echo "No files in this directory match the expected pattern, no action taken."
fi
Tested against Bash v3.2.57 on MacOS 10.13.6. The regular expressions are overly verbose as the compact expressions do not produce the same results, in this environment. The expressions can be simplified as follows, if the system supports these types of expression. The repetition of patterns [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] can be denoted with a curly braced expression like this [0-9]{8}.