I’m quite picky about my photo management. The thing I’m most picky about is my folder structure as I want to be able to live independent of a single photo management application. So far iPhoto did not allow me to keep my own structure and still use it. But that became possible with version 6 of iPhoto and as it came pre-installed on my MacBook Pro I’m now using it.

Today I spent a short while to get it nicely integrated into my workflow. Without my strict folder naming requirements I could just set iPhoto to download my photos automatically and import them whenever I connect my camera. To move them into my own structure it’s a little bit more work - but not much.

First I created the following Ruby script and saved it as ~/bin/organize-pictures.rb.

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'exifr'

TARGET_DIR = "/Users/pneff/Pictures/Digicam/"

ARGV.each do |pic|
  obj = EXIFR::JPEG.new(pic)
  if not obj.nil?
    picdate = obj.exif.date_time
    picdir = TARGET_DIR + picdate.strftime("%Y/%Y-%m-%d")
    picname = picdir + "/" + File.basename(pic)
    begin
      Dir.mkdir(picdir) unless File.exists?(picdir)
      File.rename(pic, picname)
      puts picname
    rescue
      puts "Could not rename #{pic}"
    end
  end
end

For the script to work the “exifr” module must be installed. You can do that by executing sudo gem install exifr on the command line.

This script accepts a list of file names as command line parameters. It parses the EXIF tags of each file to determine the photo’s date and then moves it into the folder specified with TARGET_DIR. The folder naming is configured inside the strftime. In my case it’s a basic folder with the year and inside that a folder with year-month-day. The script will probably fail if the year folder does not exist yet, I may fix that in the future.

Replace the value of the TARGET_DIR constant with your own folder where you store the pictures.

Afterwards I created an application using Automator with the following three actions:

  1. “Download Pictures” from the application Image Capture. You can optionally check the “Delete images from camera after download” checkbox, but I chose to leave it unchecked until I really trust that setup.
  2. “Run Shell Script” from the application Automator. Put in this script: /Users/pneff/bin/organize-pictures.rb "$@"
  3. “Import photos” from the application iPhoto. Choose the album where pictures should be imported.

Save that script as an application. I chose to save it into my bin directory in the home as well. You can test that application now by double-clicking it. The pictures should be moved to the correct folder and then imported into iPhoto.

Once everything works, launch the application Image Capture. In the preferences you can select an action that will be executed when you connect a camera. Select the application you just created with Automator.

Update August 23, 2007

Rob wrote me an e-mail with the following comment:

It looks like the version of automator included with 10.4.10 adds some fancy stuff to the first and last file in the argument list (strange quotes) which of courses messes up the file processing.

Here’s my hacky fix:

<code>
 ...
 ARGV.each do |pic|
   # clean up the crap automator adds to the first and last filename
   pic = pic.sub(/^[^\/]*\//, '/')
   pic = pic.sub(/\.JPG.*$/, '.JPG') 
   obj = EXIFR::JPEG.new(pic)
 ...
</code>

It’s hacky because it relies on a “/” to indicate the start of the filename and they have to end in .JPG but it works for my needs and might help someone else out there.