Reorganizing photos in 1 line with exiftool

A few years ago I wrote a utility in Java to find all JPG files in a directory and move them into a date-based directory structure like /YYYY/MM/DD/ based on the date the photo was taken, extracted from the exif metadata in the file. Well, apparently that was a huge waste of time, as I just discovered that exiftool, an awesome perl utility I’ve used for years to edit/extract the metadata on the command line, can also do this natively. So my entire program can be replaced with this simple command:

$ exiftool -r '-FileName<CreateDate' -d /targetDir/%Y/%Y-%m/%Y-%m-%d/%Y-%m-%d.%%f.%%e /media/EOS_DIGITAL/

This will copy the files directly off the SD card mounted at /media/EOS_DIGITAL/ into the proper structure in /targetDir/.