In Windows 7 you can quickly group photos in explorer by the date the picture was snapped – this data is readily available in the EXIF tag of the photos and added by almost all digital cameras. However, the timeline used in the ‘group by date’ option in Windows is relative. For example, files and photos are grouped by “this week”, “last week”, “last month”, “a long time ago” and such vague time periods.
If you want to automatically move and sort your photos to directories based on the specific date the photo was taken, I suggest you to try a free program called PhotoMove.
PhotoMove is based on the Perl library ExifTool, using which you can either move or copy your photos to date based subdirectories. Simply choose the directory where your photos are saved, choose the directory under which you want the date sorted files to go and then click on the ‘Find Photos’ Button.
Wait for it to finish scanning and the program will show the number of files found and number of photos that has a valid EXIF creation dates. Then click on either ‘Copy Image Files’ or ‘Move Image Files’.
One caveat of PhotoMove is that it operates on all files with embedded Exif data, not necessarily picture files. So if the source folder contain other files that uses Exif to store dates such as Microsoft Excel files (.xls) and Adobe Acrobat PDF files (.pdf), these will get moved or copied as well. So pay attention to what directories you pick to move or copy files from.
Related:
- How to create date based folder names in Windows XP
- Automatically move/copy files by extension with DropIt
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- Mp3 Folder Structure Maker Moves Music Files Into Folders By Artist, Album Name
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