batch renaming archive photos

As I’ve written about on a number of other occasions (here and here), I love using a digital camera for archival research. I’m an evangelist with graduate students, undergrads writing honors theses, and any of my colleagues who will listen for using digital cameras in the archive, something I’ve been doing since 2002. There are various approaches to this, some of which you can find described, for example, here and here.

My approach to the camera in the archive is to go big or go home! I can, and do, take thousands of photos in a week. I was in Quito this past February for a week’s worth of collecting at the ANE, and brought another 5,000 or so images back with me. It was a raid. I have criteria that I test against in the archive, and any folder that meets the tests gets photographed, even if I may not ultimately use it. In between taking the pictures and using the pictures, what do I do with them? Well, first things first— I move them off the camera and onto multiple drives when I get to the hotel each evening (to my laptop, and to an external drive, which I never carry together in the same bag!). Then, I reproduce the archive’s own box/folder structure on my hard drive and move the photos into their appropriate folders. I keep a log of documents and the corresponding image numbers in a moleskine notebook, and divide things up based on that key. Still, that leaves me with many, many folders full of randomly named images. That calls for batch processing. As I am planning on putting many of these photos up with their transcriptions on my project site, I need the file names to make sense and include a little bit of metadata. So, I rename the photos with like this: YYYYMMDD_Box.Folder_Series_picNumber. And to this, I decided to put together a python script as an exercise.

The script has one dependency outside of standard modules: easygui.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"""
photoRename.py

Created by Chad Black.
"""

import os
import easygui

photo_dir = easygui.diropenbox(msg="Choose a directory")
os.chdir(photo_dir)

new_file_name = easygui.enterbox(msg="New File Name: \n"+str(photo_dir)+'\n'+
    '(YYYYMMDD_Box.Folder_Series_)', title='New File', default=photo_dir[-4:])

files = os.listdir('.')

index=1
for filename in files:
    os.rename(filename, new_file_name+str(index).zfill(3)+'.jpg')
    index +=1

newFiles = os.listdir(photo_dir)

print "Finished! \nHere's a list of the new files: \n"+'\n'.join(newFiles)

What this file does first is open a dialogue box to pick the directory where your photos are:

Then, a second dialogue box allows you to enter the new base name that all the files will have:

Then, it walks through all the files in the directory and renames them with the basename plus a three digit number starting with 001. Finally, it lists all the renamed files as confirmation that it worked:

The script can be modified for any To make the file executable from a terminal on a Mac, first change to the directory with the file and change permissions: bash$ chmod +x photoRename.py. Then, edit your .bash_profile file, adding this: PATH:PATH$"/path/to/the/directory/". From now on, you can invoke the script from the command line by simply entering its name.

About ctb

Associate Professor of Early Latin America Department of History University of Tennessee-Knoxville

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Tagged with: Archivo Nacional Ecuador, digital archive, Digital History, python
Posted in Digital History, Processes, programming, Research and Writing