Organising your digital camera photos into directories by date

This post is mostly for my own remembrance, but someone on the Internet might find it useful as well …

After downloading photos from my digital camera I like to organise them into folders/directories named by the date they were taken.

There is a spectacularly useful command-line tool called exiftool that you can use on the command line in order to read the date taken in the photo, create a directory name according to that date, then move the photo into that directory. Firstly, make sure you have the application installed, then the magic command is:

exiftool "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" -d "%Y-%m-%d" .

(Remember to include that dot at the end)

In order to run this command, open up a terminal window, navigate to the directory where your photos are (and where you want the new directories to be created) and run this command.

Et voilà! Neatly organised photos!

Cameron Adams is a co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, where he leads the design & product teams and focuses on future product directions & innovative experiences. Read a bit more about him ›