PhockUp – Organize Camera Photos and Videos in Folders by Date

This application is not one for the faint-hearted – just kidding. It’s just another CLI tool, you shouldn’t be frightened.

PhockUp is a command-line utility application for sorting media files e.g. photos and videos from your camera in folders by day, month, and year.

How does it work?

It works by collecting all the files in a source directory and neatly copying them into an output directory without changing the content of the files as it sorts them by their date.

Any files in the source folder that aren’t images or videos will be placed (without being renamed) in a directory unknown which is created on the fly. The same will happen to any images or videos that have no creation date information; this is so that the source directory can be safely gotten rid of with all its contents organized into a new directory.

Install Phockup on Linux

Phockup is available as a snap app and can be installed on any Linux distro with support for snapd.

Install it by running the following code in a new terminal window:

$ sudo snap install phockup

If you are using Linux distribution which doesn’t support snapd or you simply don’t want to install it, you can use the below commands to install it from source.

$ sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl -y  [On Debian/Ubuntu]
$ sudo dnf install perl-Image-ExifTool -y         [On Fedora]
$ curl -L https://github.com/ivandokov/phockup/archive/1.3.0.tar.gz -o phockup.tar.gz
$ tar -zxf phockup.tar.gz
$ mv phockup-1.3.0 /opt
$ sudo ln -s /opt/phockup-1.3.0/phockup.py /usr/local/bin/phockup

As soon as you the installation is complete, use it by implementing the following command syntax.

$ phockup INPUTDIR OUTPUTDIR

The location of the folder whose contents you want to be organized is ‘INPUTDIR’ and the location to which the copied images/videos will be added to is ‘OUTPUTDIR’.

So take, for example, you want to organize your Pictures folder and save the files to a folder in your Dropbox/Phockup, – this is the command you will use:

$ phockup ~/Pictures ~/Dropbox/Phockup

Easy, right? It’s GitHub intro reads: “Media sorting tool to organize photos and videos from your camera in folders by year, month and day” and that’s exactly what it does.

Give Phockup a try if it’s your cup of tea and let us know what you think about it in the comments section below.