Notes on sorting Photos

My smart phone is an android device, it connects to my computer via MTP over USB and I store my photographs on cloud storage. Subsequently I want these pictures to be sorted, and I don’t want any duplicates.

This entire process is structured around using ArchLinux. Below is how I complete this:

Mount your phone’s storage

I use simple-mtpfs to access my phone, this is installed from the AUR using yay:

yay -S simple-mtpfs
simple-mtpfs -l
mkdir phone
simple-mtpfs --device 1 phone
ls phone

This should now print out the file and folder structure of your phone.

Install Phockup

Now we’re going to install phockup to sort the files into a coherent folder structure:

sudo pacman -S perl-image-exiftool python3
curl -L https://github.com/ivandokov/phockup/archive/latest.tar.gz -o phockup.tar.gz
tar -zxf phockup.tar.gz
sudo mv phockup-* /opt/phockup
sudo ln -s /opt/phockup/phockup.py /usr/local/bin/phockup

Mount your storage

Now we’re going to mount our cloud storage destination, using the ever useful rclone:

mkdir pictures
rclone mount drive-pictures: pictures --daemon

Sort your images

Now we can invoke phockup to sort and move the source files to the destination folder:

phockup phone/DCIM/Camera/ pictures/personal/photos/ -m
mv phone/Pictures/Screenshots/* pictures/personal/screenshots/ -v
rm -rf phone/DCIM/.thumbnails
find phone -maxdepth 2 -type d -not -path "*/\.*" -empty -delete -print

I also move my screenshots, as I like these being backed up but I don’t care about how they’re sorted. I also delete unused thumbnails and empty folders, just to keep things tidy.

Dedupe your images

Lastly, I deduplicate the images using jdupes. This will prompt you for every match it finds which copy you want:

yay -S jdupes
jdupes pictures/personal -rd

And you’re done.

• Edit 2020-10-26: Improved empty directory deletion section
• Edit 2023-02-19: Print list of directories removed