HACKER Q&A
📣 y3k

Any good FOSS solutions to organize the family albums?


Hello HN readers, do you have any suggestions on how to organize a few hundred gigabytes of family pictures and videos?

Currently I use DigiKam in 1 external HDD + borg in another external HDD and I'm planning to get a Hetzner borg box to get an off location backup too.

It's been working ok so far, but I've felt that Digikam is getting slower by the day, also doesn't seem to work fairly well on the external HDD (I started using it when I had everything on my desktop SSD, but then it grew up a few too many GBs and had to move it).

Don't really need a lot of bells and whistles, what I usually do is:

- Every few weeks / months plug everyone's iPhones / Android phones to the PC. - Copy all the pictures and videos to the HDD. - Scan the HDD with Digikam, detecting new elements. - Move the pictures videos on their espective folders, which is usually just a `YYYY > MM` structure. - Once everything has been imported and sorted, plug the other HDD and create a borg archive with the current timestamp.

It works fairly good for me so far, but I want to improve the "scan with Digikam and sort files" thing, it's by far the slowest part; I've also tried different options like gThumb and ShotWell but neither seem to have an easy way to "get all the files in this directory and move them to their right directory based on the datetime the picture was taken".

Thank you.


  👤 desro Accepted Answer ✓
My friend! This is a fantastic use for the great exiftool. Here's a link [0] to their (also good) forums where it's implemented by the author in this one-liner:

  exiftool -o . '-Directory
[0] https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=6170.0

[1] http://archive.today/e4JJQ (archive of [0] for posterity)