Organizing photos into dated folders using PowerShell

Mar 8, 2021

As an iOS user, exporting photos and saving them to the computer has always been a bit of a hassle. The most straightforward option for me has always been the native Windows 10 Photos App, which lets you organize the photos into different folders, based on the date they were taken. So all photos from August 2019 would be stored in a folder named 2019-08, and so on.

However, that stopped working at some point. I must've had some photos in a strange format, because the app would almost always crash mid-import. So I could either manually go over thousands of photos and videos to find the rogue one, or I could find another solution.

I didn't need anything too fancy. In fact, the Photos app offered even more than I needed. In the end, I decided to make a PowerShell script that could get the job done.

The script takes an input folder to take photos from, and an output path where it will create folders for every month. It will use the last modified date, which should work for most cases unless you're editing the photos (though if you're doing bulk editing, you shouldn't need this script anyway).

In order to run the script, you will need to create a text file and paste in the code shown at the end of the article. Save it as organizer.ps1.

Then, open a PowerShell prompt, cd into the folder where you saved the script and run the following script:

./organizer.ps1 --inputpath "<YOUR_INPUT_FOLDER>" --outputpath "<YOUR_OUTPUT_FOLDER>"

If you don't specify the inputpath or outputpath parameters, you'll be prompted for them.

Keep in mind that photos don't need to be in the same folder. You can simply get different DCIM folders together, and it will read them just fine.

Here's the PowerShell script – You can also find it in the GitHub repository.

param (
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$inputpath,
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$outputpath
) 

$i = 0

$items = Get-ChildItem -Path $inputpath -Recurse

$items | ForEach-Object {
    if ( -not $_.PSIsContainer)
    {
        $monthString = $_.LastWriteTime.Month.ToString()
        if ($monthString.length -lt 2) {
            $monthString = "0" + $monthString
        }
        $yearString = $_.LastWriteTime.Year
        $outputFolder = $outputpath + "\$($yearString)-$($monthString)"
        if ( -not (Test-Path $outputFolder)) 
        {
            md $outputFolder | Out-Null
        }

        $folderFiles  = @(Get-ChildItem $outputFolder -File -Filter $_.Name | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name)

        $baseName = $_.BaseName
        $extension = $_.Extension
        $newName = $baseName + $extension
        $count = 1
        while ($folderFiles -contains $newName) {
            # check for duplicated files, do not overwrite
            $newName = "{0}({1}){2}" -f $baseName, $count++, $extension
        }

        Copy-Item -Path $_.FullName -Destination "$($outputFolder)\\$($newName)"
        $i++
        Write-Progress -Activity $_.FullName -PercentComplete (($i / $items.count)*100)
           
    }
        
}
Write-Host Done!

If you have any questions, please leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail. I hope this guide will make importing photos a less annoying task for some of you.