rsync include only png images under a subfolder

Question

I am trying to synchronize a folder over ssh using rsync. In particular, I only want to get the png fils in the remote folder, as all the folder may occupy several gigas. The folder structure is the following

/path/test_0/Render/images/*.png
/path/test_1/Render/images/*.png
/path/test_2/Render/images/*.png
...

I have tried the following rsync command rsync -avzhe ssh --progress --include='**.png' --exclude='*' user@remoteserver:/path/ .

but the output is only

receiving incremental file list

sent 39 bytes  received 60 bytes  28.29 bytes/sec
total size is 0  speedup is 0.00

and nothing in synchronized.

What would be the correct way to achieve this?

Answer 1

You will have to tell rsync to include directories:

rsync -av --progress --include='*/' --include='*.png' --exclude='*' source/ target

... otherwise it won't even go down into any of the test_* directories.

You can see the matching of names against patterns if you add more -v options to the command.

I've also deleted the -e ssh option as rsync uses SSH by default, and the -z option as compression would not help with transferring PNG images to any greater extent (using compression with rsync at all is really only useful over extremely slow links).