[Solved/share] Exiftool bash script to process image in a specific time range recursively.

N0x0n@lemmy.ml · edit-2 4 months ago

[Solved/share] Exiftool bash script to process image in a specific time range recursively.

AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.net · 4 months ago

Without looking too carefully at your script, I strongly suspect the issue is the time it takes to spin up an exiftool process once per file (not ideal for any program, but I find that exiftool is especially slow to start).

I have never done this myself, but apparently there’s an option -stay_open which allows you to start up exiftool once and have it continually read arguments from a file or pipe. If you were to write your script around this flag I suspect it would be much faster. Here’s a brief forum discussion which may prove useful.

If you decide to do that, let me know how it goes! Might use it myself should the need arise.

N0x0n@lemmy.ml · 4 months ago

Hello :)

I read your comment yesterday, but was to busy improving the script with the suggestion made above. I read and tried to understand how to use this switch but after some time roaming the web I found an answer from Phil Harvey:

You don’t need to use -stay_open if you want to do the same thing to a large number of files. Just use -@ with a file list as you mentioned. The -stay_open is useful to speed things up if you want to run exiftool a number of times with different options each time. (source)

I don’t think this Is applicable in my use case (or does it ? IDK) but even if it does… I have absolutely no idea how I should/would/could implemented it… I’m pretty noob+ in bash or any other programming language… :/

Thanks for your input and I feel sorry not being able to give it a shot.

PS: With the above advice from GenderNeutralBro I went from 16min to 11min on the same sample :) Quite an improvement for a rookie script !!

AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.net · 4 months ago

Yeah, I think the fact that you need to capture the output and then use that as input to another exiftool command complicates things a lot; if you just need to run an exiftool command on each photo and not worry about the output I think the -stay_open approach would work, but I honestly have no idea how you would juggle the input and output in your case.

Regardless, I’m glad you were able to see some improvement! Honestly, I’m the wrong person to ask about bash scripts, since I only use them for really basic stuff. There are wizards who do all kinds of crazy stuff with bash, which is incredibly useful if you’re trying to create a portable tool with no dependencies beyond any binaries it may call. But personally, if I’m just hacking myself together something good enough to solve a one-off problem for myself I’d rather reach for a more powerful tool like Python which demands less from my puny brain (forgive my sacrilege for saying this in a Bash community!). Here’s an example of how I might accomplish a similar task in Python using a wrapper around exiftool which allows me to batch process all the files in one go and gives me nice structured data (dictionaries, in this case) without having to do any text manipulation:

import exiftool
import glob

files = glob.glob(r"/path/to/photos/**/*", recursive=True)
with exiftool.ExifToolHelper() as et:
  metadata = et.get_metadata(files)
  for d in metadata:
    for tag in ["EXIF:DateTimeOriginal", "EXIF:CreateDate", "File:FileCreateDate", "File:FileModifyDate", "EXIF:DateAcquired"]:
      if tag in d.keys():
        # Per file logic goes here
        print(f'{d["File:FileName"]} {d[tag]}')
        break

This outline of a script (which grabs the metadata from all files recursively and prints the filename and first date tag found for each) ran in 4.2 s for 831 photos on my machine (so ~5 ms per photo).

Since I’m not great in bash and not well versed in exiftool’s options, I just want to check my understanding: for each photo, you want to check if it’s in the specified date range, and then if it is you want to copy/move it to a directory of the format YYYYMMDD? I didn’t actually handle that logic in the script above, but I showed where you would put any arbitrary operations on each file. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to fill in the blank if you can describe your goal in a bit more detail!

N0x0n@lemmy.ml · edit-2 4 months ago

Edit:

I’m leaving my comment in case you’re willing to read it through xD ! Another user proposed a hardware solution with parallel package to run my script with all my CPU cores. Fantastic solution ! Right now I get a processing time of 1min22s for 2200 files, that’s a huge improvement. It’s not the scripts efficiency itself that got improve so if you’re inspired and still want to fill the blanks, feel free ! Otherwise It’s alright and thank you for your help 😘 !

#!/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=$(/usr/bin/vendor_perl/exiftool -m -d '%Y%m%d' -T -DateTimeOriginal -CreateDate -FileModifyDate -DateAcquired -ModifyDate "$filename" | tr -d '-' | awk '{print $1}')
#echo $FIRST_DATE

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

else
        echo "Error"

fi

time find /home/user/Pictures/ -type f | parallel ./exif-test.bash

Hey thank you for your answer :)

Here’s an example of how I might accomplish a similar task in Python using a wrapper around exiftool

I also though maybe with python It could be faster and maybe easier? Python’s syntax is easier to understand and maybe easier to troubleshoot, but who am I to make any conclusion, I’m only putting things together while roaming the web, so I have no idea what I’m talking about xD !

Since I’m not great in bash and not well versed in exiftool’s options, I just want to check my understanding: for each photo, you want to check if it’s in the specified date range, and then if it is you want to copy/move it to a directory of the format YYYYMMDD? I didn’t actually handle that logic in the script above, but I showed where you would put any arbitrary operations on each file. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to fill in the blank if you can describe your goal in a bit more detail!

Yes, because my mother has a VERY large groupe of photos on different hard drives and I need to search through a specific date (That’s the purpose of my start_range, end_range) and order them to a directory of the format YEAR/MONTH. She’s looking for something specific and only somehow remembers the date, the problem is… A huge part of her photo metadata/folder is FUCKED UP… because of how she edited the files, extracted them into other folders (lot of duplicates…) moved them and even played arround with the metadata, tags…

After a few attempts of searching through the hard drives I just though I should make a script that automates everything, I like learning new things but I’m slowly giving up because trying to make something out without the necessary skill set and knowlege is a real pain… I already did something similar with FFMPEG (but was a 2 line bash script) so I though It might be possible for this to.

As a bullet point what I’m trying to achieve is to:

Search through all the files
Process only the files in a specific start_range end_range
Order them in a directory of the format YEAR/MONTH
Use the following date time metadata in that order (DateTimeOriginal-CreateDate-FileModifyDate-ModifyDate-AcquiredDate)

I do have an actually working script that exactly does that (Thanks to a every person here trying to give me a hand), but it’s kinda slow. exiftool alone will process the same folder sample in ±2 mintues while my actual script takes 10 mins (quite an improvement over my first script I managed to put together and took 16min !) for 2200 files.

#!/bin/bash

start_range=20160101
end_range=20221212

find /home/dany/Pictures  -type f -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file_path; do
        image_path=$file_path

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

if [[ "$FIRST_DATE" != '' ]] && [[ "$FIRST_DATE" -gt $start_range ]] && [[ "$FIRST_DATE" -lt $end_range ]]; then
	exiftool -api QuickTimeUTC -d %Y/%B '-directory<dateacquired' '-directory<modifydate' '-directory<filemodifydate' '-directory<createdate' '-directory<datetimeoriginal' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' "$image_path"

else
	echo "Error"

fi

done

If you feel inspired a want to fill in the blanks, feel free :)

Thanks for your contribution !

AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.net · edit-2 4 months ago

Alright, here’s what I’ve got!

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import datetime
import glob
import os
import re
import shutil

import exiftool


files = glob.glob(r"/path/to/photos/**/*", recursive=True)
# Necessary to avoid duplicate files; if all photos have the same extension
# you could simply add that extension to the end of the glob path instead
files = [f for f in files if os.path.isfile(f)]

parent_dir = r'/path/to/sorted/photos'
start_date = datetime.datetime(2015, 1, 1)
end_date = datetime.datetime(2024, 12, 31)
date_extractor = re.compile(r'^(\d{4}):(\d{2}):(\d{2})')

with exiftool.ExifToolHelper() as et:
  metadata = et.get_metadata(files)
  for d in metadata:
    for tag in ["EXIF:DateTimeOriginal", "EXIF:CreateDate",
                "File:FileModifyDate", "EXIF:ModifyDate",
                "XMP:DateAcquired"]:
      if tag in d.keys():
        # Per file logic goes here
        year, month, day = [int(i) for i in date_extractor.match(d[tag]).group(1, 2, 3)]
        filedate = datetime.datetime(year, month, day)
        if filedate < start_date or filedate > end_date:
          break
        
        # Can uncomment below line for debugging purposes
        # print(f'{d['File:FileName']} {d[tag]} {year}/{month}')
        subdirectory = f'{parent_dir}/{year}/{month}'
        if not os.path.exists(subdirectory):
          os.makedirs(subdirectory)

        shutil.move(d['SourceFile'], subdirectory)
        
        break

Other than PyExifTool which will need to be installed using pip, all libraries used are part of the standard library. The basic flow of the script is to first grab metadata for all files using one exiftool command, then for each file to check for the existence of the desired tags in succession. If a tag is found and it’s within the specified date range, it creates the YYYY/MM subdirectory if necessary, moves the file, and then proceeds to process the next file.

In my preliminary testing, this seemed to work great! The filtering by date worked as expected, and when I ran it on my whole test set (831 files) it took ~6 seconds of wall time. My gut feeling is that once you’ve implemented the main optimization of handling everything with a single execution of exiftool, this script (regardless of programming language) is going to be heavily I/O bound because the logic itself is simple and the bulk of time is spent reading and moving files, meaning your drive’s speed will be the key limiting factor. Out of those 6 seconds, only half a second was actual CPU time. And it’s worth keeping in mind that I’m doing this on a speedy NVME SSD (6 GB/s sequential read/write, ~300K IOPS random read/write), so it’ll be slower on a traditional HDD.

There might be some unnecessary complexity for some people’s taste (e.g. using the datetime type instead of simple comparisons like in your bash script), but for something like this I’d prefer it to be brittle and break if there’s unexpected behavior because I parsed something wrong or put in nonsensical inputs rather than fail silently in a way I might not even notice.

One important caveat is that none of my photos had that XMP:DateAcquired tag, so I can’t be certain that that particular tag will work and I’m not entirely sure that will be the tag name on your photos. You may want to run this tiny script just to check the name and format of the tag to ensure that it’ll work with my script:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import exiftool
import glob
import os


files = glob.glob(r"/path/to/photos/**/*", recursive=True)
# Necessary to avoid duplicate files; if all photos have the same extension
# you could simply add that extension to the end of the glob path instead
files = [f for f in files if os.path.isfile(f)]
with exiftool.ExifToolHelper() as et:
  metadata = et.get_metadata(files)
  for d in metadata:
    if "XMP:DateAcquired" in d.keys():
      print(f'{d['File:FileName']} {d[tag]}')

If you run this on a subset of your data which contains XMP-tagged files and it correctly spits out a list of files plus the date metadata which begins YYYY:MM:DD, you’re in the clear. If nothing shows up or the date format is different, I’d need to modify the script to account for that. In the former case, if you know of a specific file that does have the tag, it’d be helpful to get the exact tag name you see in the output from this script (I don’t need the whole output, just the name of the DateAcquired key):

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import exiftool
import json


with exiftool.ExifToolHelper() as et:
  metadata = et.get_metadata([r'path/to/dateacquired/file'])
  for d in metadata:
    print(json.dumps(d, indent=4))

If you do end up using this, I’ll be curious to know how it compares to the parallel solution! If the exiftool startup time ends up being negligible on your machine I’d expect it to be similar (since they’re both ultimately I/O bound, and parallel saves time by being able to have some threads executing while others are waiting for I/O), but if the exiftool spin-up time constitutes a significant portion of the execution time you may find it to be faster! If you don’t end up using it, no worries–it was a fun little exercise and I learned about a library that will definitely save me some time in the future if I need to do some EXIF batch processing!

N0x0n@lemmy.ml · edit-2 4 months ago

Hello again :)

Sorry for pinging you ! But I somehow figured it out!

with exiftool.ExifToolHelper(common_args=None) as et:
  metadata = et.get_metadata(files)
  for d in metadata:
    for tag in ["DateTimeOriginal", "CreateDate",
                "FileModifyDate", "ModifyDate",
                "DateAcquired"]:

This seems to work as expect with only the tag names and without the need of the tag groups ([IFD0], [ExifIFD], [QuickTime]). The processing time is impressive !! Thank you !!

However if I may ask only one last thing… Is there anyway to change the file name when the file is moved and already exists to something like

/Pictures/sorted/2018/2/IMG_0993-1.JPG
/Pictures/sorted/2018/2/IMG_0993-2.JPG
/Pictures/sorted/2018/2/IMG_0993-3.JPG
....

I tried to wrap my head arround os.move or os.rename but can’t make any sense out of it !

Thank you in advance !!

AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.net · 4 months ago

Wow, nice find! I was going to handle it by just arbitrarily picking the first tag which ended with CreateDate, FileModifyDate, etc., but this is a much better solution which relies on the native behavior of exiftool. I feel kind of silly for not looking at the documentation more carefully: I couldn’t find anything immediately useful when looking at the documentation for the class used in the script (ExifToolHelper) but with the benefit of hindsight I now see this crucial detail about its parameters:

All other parameters are passed directly to the super-class constructor: exiftool.ExifTool.__init__()

And sure enough, that’s where the common_args parameter is detailed which handles this exact use case:

common_args (list of str*, or* None.) –

Pass in additional parameters for the stay-open instance of exiftool.

Defaults to ["-G", "-n"] as this is the most common use case.

-G (groupName level 1 enabled) separates the output with groupName:tag to disambiguate same-named tags under different groups.

-n (print conversion disabled) improves the speed and consistency of output, and is more machine-parsable

Passed directly into common_args property.

As for the renaming, you could handle this by using os.path.exists as with the directory creation and using a bit of logic (along with the utility functions os.path.basename and os.path.splitext) to generate a unique name before the move operation:

# Ensure uniqueness of path
basename = os.path.basename(d['SourceFile'])
filename, ext = os.path.splitext(basename)
count = 1        
while os.path.exists(f'{subdirectory}/{basename}'):
  basename = f'{filename}-{count}{ext}'
  count += 1

shutil.move(d['SourceFile'], f'{subdirectory}/{basename}')

N0x0n@lemmy.ml · edit-2 4 months ago

Hey ha :) !!

Wow, nice find! I was going to handle it by just arbitrarily picking the first tag which ended with CreateDate, FileModifyDate, etc., but this is a much better solution which relies on the native behavior of exiftool. I feel kind of silly for not looking at the documentation more carefully

Yeah I know that feeling, I posted and add unnecessary noise to Phil Harvey’s forum about something I though was a “bug” or odd behavior with EXIF-tool, while it’s was just my lacking reading skills… I felt so dumb :/. Because I’m unable to build it up form the ground myself,like you did (great work, thanks again !!), I can only fiddle around and do my best reading the documentation to somehow find my way out. I was pretty happy and had a little surge of dopamine level :D !

#Ensure uniqueness of path
basename = os.path.basename(d['SourceFile'])
...

THAT did the trick ! Thank you. I somehow “wrote” something similar but don’t look at it, it’s nonfunctional and ugly XD but I gave it a try while roaming the web.

        try:
          shutil.move(d['SourceFile'], subdirectory)
        except:
          i = 0
          while os.path.exists(d['SourceFile']):
            i += 1
            base_name, extension = os.path.splitext(d['SourceFile'])
            new_filename = f"{base_name}-{i}{extension}"
            print (new_filename)
            os.rename(d['SourceFile'], new_filename)
            shutil.move(new_filename, subdirectory)

Final words

First, your script is a bomb ! Blazing fast and does everything I wanted ! And you were right with your first impression and the -stay_open switch. That’s what PyExifTool uses under the hood (read is somewhere in the docs)! I gave it try to implement that switch with an arg file in my old/ugly/painful bash scirpt, but didn’t worked as expected. I will give it another try sometimes in the near future. Right now I’m exhausted from reading and all the re-runs to troubleshoot and test things and more than happy with your script (thanks again for everything !!!).

Second, I hope you won’t be mad, but after a thorough re-reading of the exif-tool documentation and playing around a bit, I even managed to get exif-tool do the same thing, it looks something like this:

exiftool -P -d %Y:%m:%d -if '$DateTimeOriginal gt "2018:01:01" and $DateTimeOriginal lt "2021:01:01"' -api QuickTimeUTC -r '-directory<${DateTimeOriginal#;DateFmt("%Y/%B")}/' '-FileName=%f%-c.%e' .

In plain English this translates to:

Scan recursively current directory, in a specific time range condition formatted to %Y:%m:%d and based on DateTimeOriginal tag. Order all images that respects the condition in a reformatted Year/month directory structure with the DateTimeOriginal tag. Rename the files incrementally if duplicate exist to filename-x+1.extension.

This was the first command I was working on before starting to try a bash script, but It somehow messed up the folder creation, long story short: It was because of how my command formatted the date in the condition (-d %Y/%B): 2018/June gt "2018:01:01" (yeah this will cause some strange behavior xD). However, your script is faster !!! For the same batch:

2200 files
---
Exif-Tool: 24s
PyExifTool: 11s

Compared to my painful and ugly 11 minutes script… uuuhg !

Again, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge, your help/time and staying with me. 👍 😁 I hope we will meet again and maybe/hopefully have a proper conversation on programming/scripting !

Thanks 🙏.

[Solved/share] Exiftool bash script to process image in a specific time range recursively.

[Solved/share] Exiftool bash script to process image in a specific time range recursively.

Edit

How to use

What Am I trying to achieve ?

The script in question

Things I have tried

How to Improve the processing time ?

Edit:

Final words