PicOrganizer

PicOrganizer is a dotnet core library for organizing, dating, geotagging and keyword tagging a collection of pictures and videos using file names, directory names and information from files taken at about the same time with the purpose of creating a consistent and organized photo library on the file system.

Typical use case

You inherit a large collection of pictures taken by a camera that was not equipped with a GPS device, or a libray of pictures that was converted from prints or slides. These pictures might be organized in folders with dates and/or locations contained within the directory names or file names.

PicOrganizer will extract the dates from text data by bubling up to the directory names until a date is recognized. PicOrganizer will copy these files using a structured hierarchy of folders yyyy-MM, and then add the GPS coordinates using a combination of 3 methods: From the FileName, a known timeline (ie where was I on this date) or using the location of the closest found picture on that same day.

Features Overview

• Service Based architecture to facilitate calling all or a subset of the processing routines.
• Will not alter the original files.
• Full Mode: will delete the target directory and rebuild from input data.
• Delta Mode: will use the meta data from the most recent execution and only add the new files to the library.
• Combine multiple photos and videos directories into on target directory, using a structured hierarchy yyyy-MM or other format.
• Loads csv list of known typos to correct file and directory names.
• Loads csv list of known location (ie Disneyland refers to 33.810561, -117.919494).
• Loads csv list of know locations within a time range (ie Files without geo tags between 1/2/13 14:35 and 2/3/13 17:58 are taken in New York City).
• Move duplicates files to a separate destination.
• Explicitly and individually specify files that should not be included in the target directory.
• Infer dates from file names (ie Christmas 2015 or Jan 12th, 2013 or whatsapp format will be converted to the proper DateTime).
• Generate csv reports to quickly identify what files are missing dates or locations.
• Add geo-tagging data using 3 methods:
  • From file name.
  • From Closest known location on same day.
  • From timeline.
• Create list of keywords from filename, load a list of exclusion (ie common words) and tag files.
• Remove special characters from filename as they might be misunterpreted by the libray client.
• Save meta data (list of processed files) to json for easy review.

Main dependencies

• Serilog for logging with multiple verbosity levels.
• CsvHelper to manage csv files.
• CompactExifLib to read and write pictures Exif Data.
• Microsoft.Recognizers.Text.DateTime to extract dates from file name in different langages.

Getting Started

Tested on Windows 10, 11 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Update the appSettings.json file with your parameters such as input directories and destination:

"InputSettings": {
    "SourceFolders": [
      "C:\\photolibary-source\\flickr",
      "C:\\photolibary-source\\google-photos",
      "C:\\photolibary-source\\cannon"
    ],
    "Culture": "en-us",
    "CleanDirectoryName": "C:\\photolibary-source\\clean-directory-names.csv",
    "TimelineName": "C:\\photolibary-source\\my-timeline.csv",
    "KnownLocations": "C:\\photolibary-source\\known-locations.csv",
    "StartingYearOfLibrary": 1970,
    "ExcludedFiles": [
      "IMG_0001.JPG",
      "IMG_0010.JPEG",
      "IMG_0123.JPEG"
    ],
    "Scanned": "scanned",
    "Mode": 0, // 0 is Full, 1 is Delta only
    "RetryAttempts": 2
  },
  "OutputSettings": {
    "TargetDirectories": [ "C:\\photo-library\\pic-organizer" ],

Make sure to grab the csv samples from the csv-samples folder:

my-timeline.csv

Start,End,Latitude,Longitude,MissingAddress,SampleFileName
02/27/2016 00:00:00,04/27/2018 23:59:59,37.616600,-122.384895,"SFO",""

known-locations.csv

NameInFile,Latitude,Longitude,ActualLocation
Paris,48.853001,2.349800,Notre Dame de Paris

clean-directory-names.csv

Original,ReplaceWith
19810,1981
8-88,08-1988
 1-81,01-1981
Newyork,New-York 

Execute the entire DoWork method or comment out some services, potentially to execute for a subsequent run.

    locationService.ReportMissing(target, LocationWriter.Before);
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(appSettings.InputSettings.KnownLocations) && knownLocationsFile.Exists)
        await locationService.WriteLocation(target, LocationWriter.FromFileName);
    await locationService.WriteLocation(target, LocationWriter.FromClosestSameDay);
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(appSettings.InputSettings.TimelineName) && timelineFile.Exists)
        await locationService.WriteLocation(target, LocationWriter.FromTimeline);
    locationService.ReportMissing(target, LocationWriter.After);

Upcoming Features and Improvements

Pull Requests welcome!

• Bring code coverage up
• Create a cli using https://github.com/dotnet/command-line-api
• Integrate geo-tagging API (Google maps or similar) to extract location from filename instead of using csv list
• Dockerize