Photo Sorter / mover

The Garage
#1

So we have been using DIM for a long time:

But lately it’s been stupidly slow for no apparent reason on my Wifes Mac (it’s running at 500kb/s) when the network is happy at running at 20MB/s + (over WiFi) on the same machine.

DIM hasn’t been updated in three years and starting to search the internets is turning up stuff from 2014, 2010 even some older stuff…

All I want is the ability to point at a folder full of photos (dealing with sub folders is a bonus) and then copying all the photo’s to another folder (on my NAS) in automatically labelled folders based on the EXIF data. It also needs to detect and ignore duplicates (or warn me and give me a choice).

eg
2017 Photos/2017-05-14/IMG_0001.jpg
2015 Photos/2015-12-25/IMG_0285.jpg

I don’t want it to change the file names or do anything else, just copy the photos to the new location.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Is it possible to do this with Automator?

#2

Automator might be able to do it.

Hazel is probably a better bet.

1 Like
#3

Hazel does appear to work although I need to play it a little more to see if I can get the rules juuuuuust right to do what I want without screwing with files it’s already copied… but it does look very promising!

Thanks :smiley:

#4

Silent Sifter might also be a contender for your job

http://www.vector15.com/silentsifter/

1 Like
#5

I like the price of that a little better! (although I’m happy to pay if it does what I need given how often my wife and I do this). Will have to have a look at that one too :smiley:

#6

So apparently this seemingly simple task is getting harder and harder :frowning:

So Hazel appears to work although I need to work out two things:

How does it deal with duplicate files?
How does it work in the background?
(and what happens / how reliable is it when I shut the lid of my laptop while it’s doing it’s thing (given it’s automated and all)) Does it pick up where it left off without issue?).

Silent Sifter seems to work pretty well, although it did my head in trying to work out how to get the folder naming working how I wanted. (It seems needlessly complicated to setup). Once it was configured though it seems OK…

With a but.

Running a test folder of 5 photo’s works just fine, seems to see duplicates and logs that, copies new ones nicely… But when I pointed it at my photo library it wanted to scan everything (read a couple of hundred thousand photos) and it was estimating over 24 hours to do that (over WiFi at the moment but I could hook it up to ethernet for the first scan if needed).
I would live in hope that it only does that once, although given this needs to run across two computers I wonder how long it would take every time I run the sift … because any amount of time is probably going to be too long when it comes to a library of that size over WiFi.

Plan C: Fiddle with DIM to get it working better.
Plan D: Learn Apple Script and built my own script