How to move (image) files to other directories based on files' dates

Question

I have a directory (currdir) with 24000 images on a CentOS/cPanel server.

I want to split this directory by moving images from this directory into other directories (or sub-directories inside currdir) based on image dates.

How to make it happen?

Answer 1

This will run a find command that outputs a shell command moving the file in a directory based on the last change time of the file. It will create the target on the directory on the fly (mkdir -p will not fail if directory already exists). The generated commands are then directly piped into a shell interpreter.

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf "mkdir -p %CY/%Cm/%Cd && mv -- '%f' %CY/%Cm/%Cd\n" | sh

(assumes GNU find for its -printf predicate).

Replace %C with %T for the last modification time (a generally more accurate representation of the age of the contents of the file as the change time is also updated when metadata of the file is modified).

Note that this may not be the most efficient way to do it, as it will create a lot of processes to create directories ad move files. As it is for a one-shot execution, I wouldn't focus too much on this...

It assumes file names don't contain ' characters (it constitutes a command injection vulnerability if you can't guarantee it).

You can pass the -x option (or -o xtrace) to sh for it to show you what it's doing, or -e (or -o errexit) for it to exit upon the first error (though with -e, you'd want to replace the && with ; as otherwise failures of mkdir would be ignored).

Answer 2

With exiftool:

exiftool -ext jpg '-Directory<FileModifyDate' -d %Y/%m/%d .

Would move the files with jpg extension in the current working directory to YYYY/MM/DD subdirectories (creating them as needed) based on the FileModifyDate.

exiftool -args file.jpg will show you what other timestamps relevant to the files you may use instead of FileModifyDate, (including those from the EXIF metadata stored by the camera in the JPEG file) such as FileInodeChangeDate, FileAccessDate, ModifyDate, DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate.