🖼️ Go Media Sorter

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An intelligent media file organizer written in Go. This tool renames your photos and videos to a clean, consistent PREFIX_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.ext format based on their metadata. It's safe, fast, configurable, and cross-platform.

This project is a high-performance port and enhancement of an exceptionally well-written shell script.

✨ Features

• Intelligent Timestamping: Prioritizes authoritative metadata (EXIF/QuickTime) for renaming. If metadata is missing, it safely falls back to the file's last modification time (mtime).
• Metadata Enrichment: Intelligently fills in empty date/time tags within your media files (e.g., DateTimeOriginal, CreateDate) using the authoritative timestamp. It never overwrites existing valid data.
• System Timestamp Sync: Synchronizes the file's system modification time to match the authoritative timestamp, ensuring consistency across your filesystem.
• Safety First:
  • Automatic Backups: Creates a full .tar.gz backup of your target directory before making any changes.
  • Confirmation Prompt: Requires explicit user confirmation before starting, preventing accidental runs.
  • Conflict Resolution: If two files have the exact same timestamp, it adds a random suffix _[xxx] to avoid overwriting.
• Dependency Awareness: Automatically detects if the ExifTool dependency is missing and enters a safe, limited-functionality mode with clear warnings.
• Highly Configurable: All key parameters (file prefixes, supported extensions, timezone) are managed in a simple config.json file. No need to edit the code.
• Cross-Platform: Built with Go, it can be compiled to a single native executable for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

🔧 Prerequisites

This tool relies on the excellent ExifTool to read and write media metadata. You must have it installed on your system.

• On Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S perl-image-exiftool
• On Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl
• On macOS (with Homebrew): brew install exiftool
• On Windows: Download from the ExifTool website.

🚀 Getting Started

1. Install ExifTool (see above).
2. Go to the Releases Page of this repository.
3. Download the appropriate binary for your operating system (e.g., media-sorter_linux_amd64).
4. Download the config.json file.
5. Place both the executable and config.json in the same directory.
6. (For Linux/macOS) Make the binary executable:

   chmod +x ./media-sorter_linux_amd64

⌨️ Usage

Run the program from your terminal, pointing it to the directory you want to organize.

# Basic usage with the -dir flag
./media-sorter -dir /path/to/your/photos

# You can also use a positional argument
./media-sorter /path/to/your/photos

Command-line Flags:

Flag	Description	Default
-dir	The target directory to process. (Required)	""
-depth	Max depth for directory traversal. -1 for infinite (default).	-1
-backup-dir	Directory to store backups.	"./media_backups"
-exiftool-path	Manually specify the full path to the exiftool executable.	""
-no-backup	Disable the default backup process.	false
-yes	Bypass the interactive confirmation prompt.	false
-v, --version	Show the application message.	false
-h, --help	Show this help message.	false

⚙️ Configuration

You can customize the tool's behavior by editing the config.json file.

{
  "image_prefix": "IMG",
  "video_prefix": "VID",
  "target_timezone": "+08:00",
  "supported_image_extensions": [
    "jpg", "jpeg", "png", "heic", "webp", "gif"
  ],
  "supported_video_extensions": [
    "mp4", "mov", "avi", "mkv"
  ]
}

• image_prefix / video_prefix: The text prepended to renamed image/video files.
• target_timezone: The timezone used when writing EXIF tags to images.
• supported_*_extensions: Case-insensitive lists of file types to process.

For Developers: Build from Source

1. Install Go (version 1.18+).
2. Clone the repository, and build the optimized binary:

   # Clone the repository
   git clone https://github.com/Cornfy/media-sorter.git
   
   # navigate into the directory
   cd media-sorter
   
   # and build it
   go build -ldflags="-s -w"
   # or you can use the Makefile to build
   make help