shotsort

In-card photo & video organizer. Move media out of a camera card's DCIM/ jungle into readable, capture-date folders — on the same card, using atomic renames. No copying to a computer, no database, no fuss.

<card>/DCIM/100MSDCF/DSC00001.ARW   →   <card>/Organized/2026/2026-06-20/DSC00001.ARW

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⚠️ Read this first — this is not a backup

shotsort moves files. After a run, the organized result lives only on that one card. A single in-camera format, or a card failure, loses everything.

• This is a destructive + single-copy + fragile-media combination. shotsort uses atomic renames and a journal to make "losing a file mid-operation" essentially impossible, but that is not a substitute for a backup.
• Back the whole card up to a computer or drive at least occasionally.
• Once files leave DCIM/, the camera's playback can no longer see them and may show an "Image Database File error". This is expected.

If you want a copy on your computer instead of an in-card move, use --copy.

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What makes it safe

• Atomic moves. On one filesystem, every file is moved with a single rename(2). At any instant — and any interruption point — each file is wholly at its old path or its new path, never half-written, never gone.
• Never invents deletions. A source file only "disappears" because a rename put it somewhere else. The only path that ever deletes is the cross-filesystem fallback, and only after a byte-for-byte hash check passes.
• Anti-recursion. The destination subtree is excluded from the scan, so freshly-moved files are never picked up and moved again.
• Forbidden zones. It refuses to write into DCIM/ or any camera-managed directory (PRIVATE, MP_ROOT, M4ROOT, AVF_INFO, MISC, SONY), and never scans them.
• Preview + journal + undo. --dry-run shows the full plan without touching anything; every committed move is appended to a journal; undo rolls a whole run back.

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Install

Requires a Rust toolchain (rustup).

git clone https://github.com/BoJiang03/Shotsort.git shotsort
cd shotsort
cargo build --release
# binary at target/release/shotsort

Usage

# 1) Preview the plan, move nothing
shotsort /Volumes/SONY/DCIM --dest /Volumes/SONY/Organized --dry-run

# 2) Organize in place (the default action is MOVE)
shotsort /Volumes/SONY/DCIM --dest /Volumes/SONY/Organized

# 3) Move + rename to readable names + clean out emptied DCIM subfolders
shotsort /Volumes/SONY/DCIM --dest /Volumes/SONY/Organized \
  --name-template "{YYYY}{MM}{DD}_{HH}{mm}{ss}" --clean-empty-dirs

# 4) Roll back the last run
shotsort undo --journal /Volumes/SONY/Organized/.shotsort-journal.jsonl

Before doing anything destructive shotsort prints a plan summary and asks for confirmation (skip it with --yes).

Two modes: photo and video

--mode photo (the default) is everything above: it scans DCIM/ and moves stills and clips into date folders.

--mode video handles the videos that photo mode deliberately leaves alone. Camcorder-style footage (Sony XAVC S in PRIVATE/M4ROOT/CLIP, AVCHD in PRIVATE/AVCHD/.../STREAM) is not a loose file in DCIM — each clip is tied to a camera database, thumbnails, and sidecars. Moving the bare .MP4 out would break in-camera playback. So video mode copies the master clips out (never moves, never deletes the originals), into the same date-folder layout:

# Point SOURCE at the CARD ROOT (not DCIM) and copy clips into date folders.
shotsort /Volumes/SONY --dest /Volumes/SONY/Videos --mode video --dry-run
shotsort /Volumes/SONY --dest /Volumes/SONY/Videos --mode video

Proxies, thumbnails, audio and metadata trees (SUB, THMBNL, WAV, GENERAL, DATABASE, …) are skipped — only the full-resolution masters are copied. undo on a video run deletes the copies and leaves every original in place.

--link: a date view without duplicating the data

Add --link to make the destination entries relative symlinks into the source instead of byte-for-byte copies — a browsable date view that costs no extra space:

shotsort /Volumes/SONY --dest /Volumes/SONY/Videos --mode video --link

The links are relative, so they keep working when the card is renamed or remounted. Caveats worth knowing: they are a macOS-on-exFAT feature — Windows, the camera, and other devices see them as broken stubs; and copying the view elsewhere with a normal tool copies the links, not the videos. Use it for on-Mac browsing, not as a backup. undo removes the links and never touches an original.

match: gather the RAWs behind a PixCake selection

If you shoot tethered into PixCake (像素蛋糕) — low-res preview JPEGs stream to the Mac while the camera saves RAW-only to the card — shotsort match closes the loop after the model picks her keepers:

shotsort match --project "My Shoot" \
  --raw-src /Volumes/Picture/Organized \   # RAW archive root; scanned across all days
  --out     ~/Deliveries/my-shoot-selects    # keeper RAWs land here

It reads PixCake's own project database to learn which previews are kept (a photo "removed" in PixCake only leaves the project — the file stays on disk, so the folder can't tell you), then finds each keeper's RAW by an exact capture-time match: EXIF DateTimeOriginal plus SubSecTimeOriginal, to the millisecond. The camera writes the same value to a shot's JPEG and its RAW, so the pairing is unique even inside a 30fps burst — sequence numbers, which drift between the two naming schemes, are never used.

Matched RAWs are copied by default (--action move to pull them out of the archive, --action link for symlinks); unmatched or ambiguous keepers are listed, never guessed. The gather is journalled, so shotsort undo --journal <out>/.shotsort-journal.jsonl reverses it. macOS + PixCake only; add --dry-run to preview.

Options

Option	Default	Meaning
--dry-run	off	Compute and print the plan; touch nothing
--mode <m>	photo	photo MOVES from DCIM; video COPIES camera clips out of managed dirs (point SOURCE at the card root)
--copy	off	Copy instead of move (keeps the source)
--link	off	Write relative symlinks instead of copying bytes (Mac-only date view; keeps the source)
--types <list>	all	raw,jpeg,video (comma-separated) or all
--ext <list>	—	Explicit extension whitelist; overrides --types
--folder-template <TPL>	{YYYY}/{YYYY}-{MM}-{DD}	Destination sub-folder template
--name-template <TPL>	{original}	File-name template
--date-source <src>	exif	exif / mtime / exif-then-mtime
--on-missing-date <m>	unknown-folder	skip / mtime / unknown-folder (→ NoDate/)
--on-conflict <c>	rename	Target exists, different content: rename / skip / overwrite
--dedup <d>	name	Duplicate test: name / hash / off
--verify <mode>	auto	auto / size / hash / off
--clean-empty-dirs	off	Remove source subfolders left empty (never managed dirs)
--journal <FILE>	<dest>/.shotsort-journal.jsonl	Journal path (resume + undo)
--manifest <FILE>	—	Per-file result manifest (.json or .csv)
--tz-offset <OFF>	—	Fixed offset (e.g. +08:00) for UTC video times
--config <FILE>	./shotsort.toml	Config file (CLI options override it)
--jobs <N>	1	Reserved; transfers currently run serially for safety
--yes	off	Skip the confirmation prompt
--quiet / --verbose	—	Output detail

Templates

Tokens: {YYYY} {YY} {MM} {DD} {HH} {mm} {ss} {original} {ext} {counter} {counter:03} {camera_make} {camera_model}.

• Default folder {YYYY}/{YYYY}-{MM}-{DD} → 2026/2026-06-20/
• Default name {original} keeps the original name — the safest choice, and it keeps RAW/JPEG pairs together automatically.
• {counter} is a per-folder sequence number in capture order; the extension is always appended automatically.

File types

• RAW: arw, cr2, cr3, nef, raf, orf, rw2, dng, pef, srw, nrw
• Image: jpg, jpeg, heic, heif, tif, tiff, png
• Video: mp4, mov, m4v, avi, mts, m2ts
• Sidecar: xmp (never processed alone; follows its same-stem primary)

RAW + JPEG with the same stem are grouped so they share a date and land in the same folder under the same new name.

Dates & time zones

• Images: EXIF DateTimeOriginal → DateTimeDigitized → DateTime, used as local wall-clock time (no UTC shifting, so the day never moves).
• Videos (MP4/MOV): the mvhd creation time, which is stored as UTC seconds since 1904. By default it's converted to your system local time; pass --tz-offset to pin a fixed offset and avoid a day-boundary surprise.

Config file

shotsort.toml in the working directory (or --config <path>):

dest             = "/Volumes/SONY/Organized"
types            = ["raw", "jpeg", "video"]
folder_template  = "{YYYY}/{YYYY}-{MM}-{DD}"
name_template    = "{original}"
on_conflict      = "rename"
dedup            = "name"
jobs             = 1
clean_empty_dirs = false

Exit codes

0 on a clean run; non-zero if any file errored (each error is reported and the run continues past it).

License

MIT (see LICENSE).