Photo Renamer

Just made Photo Renamer script

photo_renamer.sh is a cross-platform shell script for organizing messy photo/video archives into a clean, chronological folder structure based on metadata (EXIF and fallback timestamps). Designed to handle multi-device backups with duplicates, inconsistent naming, and unsorted content.

👉 You can find the full script and instructions on GitHub: photo_renamer.sh

✨ Features

• ✅ EXIF-based date extraction (DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate, etc.)
• ✅ Fallback to file creation/modification time
• ✅ Smart renaming to format: YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.ext
• ✅ Optional prefix (IMG_, VID_) toggle
• ✅ Duplicate-safe: adds suffixes only when needed
• ✅ Handles name collisions by appending suffixes only when needed (e.g., IMG_20230701-143000_001.jpg)
• ✅ Idempotent: supports repeated runs with _Renamed exclusion
• ✅ MPO & RAW support (e.g. .cr2, .mpo)
• ✅ CLI preview before execution
• ✅ Synology-compatible & lightweight (no DB or indexing)

📦 Output structure

/_Renamed/
└── 2023/
└── 07/
├── IMG_20230701-143000.jpg
├── VID_20230701-150000.mp4
└── …

🧪 Example before and after

Before:

📁 someone_phone/backup_07/DCIM/
  ├── IMG_20210809_100101.jpg
  ├── 20200902_090143(0).jpg
  ├── VID_20220326_113304.mp4
  └── IMG-20210902-WA0010.jpg

After:

📁 _Renamed/
  ├── 2020/09/IMG_20200902-090143.jpg
  ├── 2021/08/IMG_20210809-100101.jpg
  ├── 2021/09/IMG_20210902-000000.jpg
  └── 2022/03/VID_20220326-093327.mp4

🔧 Usage

sh photo_renamer.sh

• Requires exiftool
• Tested on macOS, Linux, Synology DSM (with exiftool installed)
• Interactive confirmation before renaming
• Excludes already renamed folders (_Renamed, @eaDir, @Recycle, etc.)

⚙️ Configuration

Edit constants at the top of the script:

ADD_PREFIX=0       # 1 to enable IMG_/VID_ prefix, 0 to disable
TARGET_ROOT="./_Renamed"

📌 Why this script?

This tool was born out of frustration with 15+ years of backups from multiples phones, cloud dumps, messily named folders and files like IMG_20210809_100101.jpg or [17.04.2008] - 010.mp4. It aims to:

• unify naming
• eliminate duplicates
• allow easy merge of backups
• support future deduplication and cloud import
• handles file name collisions gracefully by preserving content and avoiding overwrites