Gester

A shell script for automating media ingest.

Usage

./gester.sh [SOURCE_DIR] [TARGET_DIR] [DATE_FORMAT]

Where:

• SOURCE_DIR is the directory of the source media (such as the DCIM directory of a camera's SD card).
• TARGET_DIR is the directory in which you want to ingest media (where gester will copy media files to).
• DATE_FORMAT is the format of the subdirectories that will be created inside of TARGET.
  • YYYY for the year
  • MM for the month
  • DD for the day

You can add the following line to your shell configuration (e.g. ~/.bashrc) to use gester anywhere:

alias gester="/path/to/gester.sh"

Examples

• ./gester.sh /path/to/source /path/to/target YYYY-MM-DD
• ./gester.sh /path/to/source /path/to/target YYYY/MM/
• ./gester.sh /path/to/source /path/to/target YYYY

Features

• Supports any media file that contains EXIF metadata that can be read by ExifTool
• Preserves FileModifyDate EXIF tag
• Configurable destination subdirectory formatting
• Checks for file parity after copying each file to ensure the copy was successful
• Skips files that already exist in the destination directory

Required Software

• ExifTool: Application for reading, writing and editing meta information.