Edit

After a long process of roaming the web, re-runs and troubleshoot the script with this wonderful community, the script is functional and does what it’s intended to do. The script itself is probably even further improvable in terms of efficiency/logic, but I lack the necessary skills/knowledge to do so, feel free to copy, edit or even propose a more efficient way of doing the same thing.

I’m greatly thankful to @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected] and Phil Harvey (exiftool) for their help, time and all the great idea’s (and spoon-feeding me with simple and comprehensive examples ! )

How to use

Prerequisites:

• parallel package installed on your distribution

Copy/past the below script in a file and make it executable. Change the start_range/end_range to your needs and install the parallel package depending on your OS and run the following command:

time find /path/to/your/image/directory/ -type f | parallel ./script-name.sh

This will order only the pictures from your specified time range into the following structure YEAR/MONTH in your current directory from 5 different time tag/timestamps (DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate, FileModifyDate, ModifyDate, DateAcquired).

You may want to swap ModifyDate and FileModifyDate in the script, because ModifyDate is more accurate in a sense that FileModifyDate is easily changeable (as soon as you make some modification to the pictures, this will change to your current date). I needed that order for my specific use case.

From: '-directory<$DateAcquired/' '-directory<$ModifyDate/' '-directory<$FileModifyDate/' '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/'

To: '-directory<$DateAcquired/' '-directory<$FileModifyDate/' '-directory<$ModifyDate/' '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/'

As per exfitool’s documentation:

ExifTool evaluates the command-line arguments left to right, and latter assignments to the same tag override earlier ones.

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 <filename>"
    exit 1
fi

# Concatenate all arguments into one string for the filename, so calling "./script.sh /path/with spaces.jpg" should work without quoting
filename="$*"

start_range=20170101
end_range=20201230

FIRST_DATE=$(exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal -CreateDate -FileModifyDate -DateAcquired -ModifyDate "$filename" | tr -d '-' | awk '{print $1}')

if [[ "$FIRST_DATE" != '' ]] && [[ "$FIRST_DATE" -gt $start_range ]] && [[ "$FIRST_DATE" -lt $end_range ]]; then
        exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -d %Y/%B '-directory<$DateAcquired/' '-directory<$ModifyDate/' '-directory<$FileModifyDate/' '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"

else
        echo "Not in the specified time range"

fi

---

---

Hi everyone !

Please no bash-shaming, I did my outmost best to somehow put everything together and make it somehow work without any prior bash programming knowledge. It took me a lot of effort and time.

While I’m pretty happy with the result, I find the execution time very slow: 16min for 2288 files.

On a big folder with approximately 50,062 files, this would take over 6 hours !!!

If someone could have a look and give me some easy to understand hints, I would greatly appreciate it.

What Am I trying to achieve ?

Create a bash script that use exiftool to stripe the date from images in a readable format (20240101) and compare it with an end_range to order only images from that specific date range (ex: 2020-01-01 -> 2020-12-30).

Also, some images lost some EXIF data, so I have to loop through specific time fields:

• DateTimeOriginal
• CreateDate
• FileModifyDate
• DateAcquired

The script in question

#!/bin/bash

shopt -s globstar

folder_name=/home/user/Pictures
start_range=20170101
end_range=20180130


for filename in $folder_name/**/*; do

	if [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
		DateTimeOriginal=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal "$filename")
	        if  [ "$DateTimeOriginal" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$DateTimeOriginal" -lt $end_range ]; then
			/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
			echo "Found a value"
		echo "Okay its $(tput setab 22)DateTimeOriginal$(tput sgr0)"

		fi

        elif [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -CreateDate "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                CreateDate=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -CreateDate "$filename")
                if  [ "$CreateDate" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$CreateDate" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 27)CreateDate$(tput sgr0)"
                fi

        elif [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -FileModifyDate "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                FileModifyDate=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -FileModifyDate "$filename")
                if  [ "$FileModifyDate" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$FileModifyDate" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$FileModifyDate/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 202)FileModifyDate$(tput sgr0)"
                fi


        elif [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateAcquired "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                DateAcquired=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateAcquired "$filename")
                if  [ "$DateAcquired" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$DateAcquired" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$DateAcquired/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 172)DateAcquired(tput sgr0)"
                fi

        elif [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -ModifyDate "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                ModifyDate=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -ModifyDate "$filename")
                if  [ "$ModifyDate" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$ModifyDate" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$ModifyDate/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 135)ModifyDate(tput sgr0)"
                fi

        else
                echo "No EXIF field found"

done

Things I have tried

1. Reducing the number of if calls

But it didn’t much improve the execution time (maybe a few ms?). The syntax looks way less readable but what I did, was to add a lot of or ( || ) in the syntax to reduce to a single if call. It’s not finished, I just gave it a test drive with 2 EXIF fields (DateTimeOriginal and CreateDate) to see if it could somehow improve time. But meeeh :/.

#!/bin/bash

shopt -s globstar

folder_name=/home/user/Pictures
start_range=20170101
end_range=20201230

for filename in $folder_name/**/*; do

        if [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]] || [[ $(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -CreateDate "$filename") =~ ^[0-9]+$ ]]; then
                DateTimeOriginal=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal "$filename")
		CreateDate=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -d '%Y%m%d' -T -CreateDate "$filename")
                if  [ "$DateTimeOriginal" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$DateTimeOriginal" -lt $end_range ] || [ "$CreateDate" -gt $start_range ] && [ "$CreateDate" -lt $end_range ]; then
                        /usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -r -d %Y/%B '-directory<$DateTimeOriginal/' '-directory<$CreateDate/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$filename"
                        echo "Found a value"
                echo "Okay its $(tput setab 22)DateTimeOriginal$(tput sgr0)"

                else
			echo "FINISH YOUR SYNTAX !!"
		fi

	fi
done

2. Playing around with find

To recursively find my image files in all my folders I first tried the find function, but that gave me a lot of headaches… When my image file name had some spaces in it, it just broke the image path strangely… And all answers I found on the web were gibberish, and I couldn’t make it work in my script properly… Lost over 4 yours only on that specific issue !

To overcome the hurdle someone suggest to use shopt -s globstar with for filename in $folder_name/**/* and this works perfectly. But I have no idea If this could be the culprit of slow execution time?

3. Changing all [ ] into [[ ]]

That also didn’t do the trick.

How to Improve the processing time ?

I have no Idea if it’s related to my script or the exiftool call that makes the script so slow. This isn’t that much of a complicated script, I mean, it’s a comparison between 2 integers not a hashing of complex numbers.

I hope someone could guide me in the right direction :)

Thanks !