Happy New Year.

Its been a nice restful Christmas and I’ve had some time to go through and sort out lots of my photos from the last year. Since I started taking a lot more photographs I’ve been categorising them by year then into sub-folders of when and what we were doing, so for 2014 that was about twenty folders. This barely scratches the surface of the photos I take because most are actually taken with my phone. It goes everywhere with me, so from quick little things that make me laugh, to views when I wish I had a full camera, there’s probably a shot on my phone. All of those images are automatically backed up to Google Plus’ Photo service, which is great as my photographs are on all my devices and it does a nice job of auto correcting some of the limitations of a camera phone. However one thing that is seriously lacking is the ability to get those photographs back out directly from the photo service.

Google offers a TakeOut facility to let you retrieve any of the data Google holds on you. Go to google.com/settings/takeout from there you can de-select everything and pick only photos and press next to create a series of archives. I have two problems with the TakeOut download first it creates a directory for each day of uploads, so potentially that 365 subdirectories for the year. Secondly every uploaded file can be auto-edited potentially several times and each edit is included in the download. Ideally what I wanted was a single directory with just the photographs I’ve taken, PowerShell makes this kind of operation incredibly simple. A quick script later and we are down from 4 Gb to 2.5 Gb and all in one directory.  I’ve uploaded the script to do this to a Gist here.

 

[caption id=”attachment_292” align=”aligncenter” width=”199”]Waverley Abbey Waverley Abbey in the setting sun[/caption]