I downloaded all my photos with google takeout.
The folder structure is an absolute mess.
It would be nice to organise them into YYYY/MM folders but I haven’t been able to think of an easy way to do that.
I note that all images seem to have sidecar files ? Like matching json files. I’ve never encountered these before and not really aware of any command line tools that support them. It’s just another challenge as regards writing a script to re-organise files.
Any insights much appreciated.
Check out exif tool. You could also incorporate jq a command line json parser, to extract data from the json file. If you are trying to do higher level sorting/organization, you may consider using a scripting language other than bash/zsh. Guaranteed there is a Python package for reading exif data.
https://askubuntu.com/a/404632
There’s the python image library (and a fork of it called pillow) and exif. There’s probably a bunch of others, too.
As I recall working with EXIF is generally a pain in the butt. In js the best you can hope for is a wrapper around some CLI based thing that I can’t remember the name of right now.