Sort Files to SubFolders by Month

[fischmir]

Hi everyone,

I am not a pro-photograph. I just use iMatch as a database. I heavily use it for ratings...However, at the end of the year, I have ~ 3.500 pictures from my wife's iPhone and some friends for the entire year including all "events" like holiday,...At the end of the day, I want to create photobook, mostly organized by months.

In my workflow, I first rename all files to ~"date_time". Afterwards I can more or less paste ALL pics into one folder. In my next step, I create 12 subfolders (for each month Jan - Dec). So I divide (and conquer) and files.

I am searching an App which does exactly this for me: Take each pictures and get the year.month when it was taken. Afterwards, move this files to a subolder year.month (or create it in case it is not existing yet).  As I know from others forums where I am active, I'd like to ask if somebody done this before or knows a good solution for this?

Thanks,
Christian

[Mario]

You can do that easily with the powerful Renamer in IMatch.

The Renamer can rename files based on many criteria (including date and time of course).
And it can copy or move files into other folders. And create the folders at the same time.
The names of the folders are fully dynamic and controlled via normal IMatch variables. Which makes it easy to create them from a month name or year/month or whatever you want.

If you have not used the Renamer yet, I would recommend:

1. Create a new folder in IMatch and copy a few dozen of your files into this. This allows you to test every Renamer feature safely.
2. Read the Renamer help topic (link above) and setup the steps to rename your files in your normal naming scheme. There are many examples in the help.
3. Setup a move step which moves the files into sub-folders created from one of the datetime variables.

Let us know if you need additional help with one of these steps.

[JohnZeman]

Although I do rename all of my files (photos) using a YYYY_MMDD_HHMMSS_SSS format, I wouldn't have to do that since I use a data driven category to automatically create a date organized category tree for me.

IMatch reads the date created from a metadata tag in each file and automatically generates the category tree like the following

Century
Decade
Year
Headline
Month
Day

I don't have to create anything, IMatch does it all.  Of course for this to work each file must have the correct date created metadata for IMatch to use.

To do this I use the value contained in the

Exif::Main\36867\DateTimeOriginal\0

Tag of each file where the date created timestamp (at least for my country) is stored in the following format:

2019:10:18 13:07:30
YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS

IMatch parses that timestamp and creates the category tree for me (see attached screenshot).

[Mario]

This is a good way to do it, unless you want to have the files in specific physical folders based on year/month/....

Of course you also see your files organized by year, month, day also in the Timeline. Automatically and independent from their physical location.


A suggestion:

Instead of using the EXIF timestamp directly, I would recommend to use the

{File.MD.XMP::xmp\CreateDate\CreateDate\0} or {File.MD.XMP::photoshop\DateCreated\DateCreated\0}

variables instead. These time stamps exist and work also for non-image formats and files without EXIF metadata. IMatch fills these from the best available date and time information.
IMatch uses these in the Metadata Panel, for the Timeline etc.

[JohnZeman]

That's a good suggestion Mario, thanks.

The EXIF date tag has been working great for me because for all of my very old scanned images I'd previously used ExifTool to set the timestamp of the EXIF tag.

I'll make a note to try the tags you suggest instead.  I can see where they would be better in case I find some old photos to scan again or decide to add some non photo format files to my database.

[Mario]

if your files have EXIF data, the XMP time stamps are filled from these during import (EXIF => XMP) so the data will be identical.
I just recommend XMP because it is the 'super' format and IMatch updates XMP timestamps only (and the EXIF timestamps during write-back).

[JohnZeman]

Just changed my data-driven category timestamp tag from the EXIF one to

XMP::xmp\CreateDate\CreateDate\0

And everything seems to be working just fine.

Apologies to Christian, I didn't mean to hijack your thread, just kind of got on a roll here blabbing about my situation.

[fischmir]

Sorry...long time no see.

When I use {File.MD.XMP::xmp\CreateDate\CreateDate\0} I assume iMatch will create Folder which each Calender-Date.

But I want an Folder for each MONTH.

How to proceed?

[JohnZeman]

Attached is a screenshot of the way I do it using a Data-Driven category.
Note this screenshot only shows Level 5 of the my 6 level data-driven category.
It parses the timestamp and displays it as month number then full name.
For example this timestamp

2019:10:18 13:07:30.275

Will display a month as

10 October

(I like the number first so the months are always shown in the order they occur).

You can also do the same thing using variables but I prefer this method instead.

[fischmir]

I understand, but I want to physically store them per month on my harddrive.

As far as I understood, this is not the case in your solution, right?

[JohnZeman]

Ah, that's right I didn't realize you wanted to store the images in actual folders instead of categories.

I haven't given it much thought yet but assuming you don't want to create the folder tree manually I believe it would take a custom app to do that.

I store my photos in year folders, then I let IMatch do the work to group them by month in categories.

[Mario]

I understand, but I want to physically store them per month on my harddrive.

As far as I understood, this is not the case in your solution, right?

As I said in my initial reply, the Renamer can do that.
Does this not work for you?

[fischmir]

Generally yes, but not in this scenario. I like to have a folder per month, but not per date but don't know which field to use.

Your suggestion was {File.MD.XMP::xmp\CreateDate\CreateDate\0} which cretaed too many folders.

Do you know what I mean?

[fischmir]

Ok, got it....

{File.MD.XMP::xmp\CreateDate\CreateDate\0|format:YYYY} does the trick!

[Mario]

Precisely. You as the user have full control over the variable. You can use only the year. Or year/month. Or year/month/day. Or year/months/day/hour.  Or year/month/camera model name...
IMatch is so flexible!