Is there software that will do this?

[DT4K]

I have thousands of photos on my pc. Some have been renamed, some have been moved into different folders. They come from several different cameras, so the naming schemes and folder structures vary. Basically, it's a big mess right now.
What I would like to do is reorganize them all based on the date the pictures were taken.
So I'd like to have one folder for "Pictures", then underneath that, I'd like to have folders with names like "01-22-2006", etc.

Is there any software that can search through all my photos and copy each file to the correct folder based on the date the picture was taken?

 

[Anubis]

iPhoto and Lightroom are your best bets, IDK if they will do all the naming for you but you can sort all photos by date, then manually create the folders and move the pics

 

[DT4K]

If I'm going to have to manually create the folders, I could just do a search in Windows Explorer, add the "Date Picture Taken" column, sort by that column, and copy one day's worth at a time.

I was hoping there was something that would automatically create the various date folders and move the pictures to the appropriate one. If not, I might just write up my own .Net app to do it. I'll have to see if there is any code out there to read exif properties of a file.

 

[soydios]

I have Adobe Lightroom set up to copy all imported files to new folders, which are named by date.

 

[DT4K]

At some point, I might spend that kind of money on photo software, but not right now.
I did end up finding some .Net code that lets you look at exif data for a file. So I wrote a little program that lets you pick a source directory to search and a destination directory to copy the files to. Then it finds all the jpegs(I haven't done anything with raw yet) under that search folder, checks the date the picture was taken, creates a new folder named by date if one doesn't exist, then copies the file to that new folder. It's a simple program without any flexibility (other than selecting the search folder and base destination folder), but if anyone else has a use for it, I'd be happy to share.

 

[dez93]

http://www.styopkin.com/automatic_photo_sorter.html
nabbed from another poster in a different search i found. just in case anyone ever reads this!

 

[randomlinh]

wow, blast from the past, heh. wouldn't picasa do this now? well, it at least would view it by date. dunno if it'll actually re-org your folders for you based on exif

 

[soydios]

Lightroom will move and rename by date on import.

 

[theblackbox]

aperture will do it as well, and handles photos much better then iphoto, and actually works great on multi core processors, so if you have 10s of thousands of photos to deal with.