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Downloading photos from a digital camera can be a tedious task. Most of the times you just don’t want to use the software supplied with your camera to download and organize your photos. Copying all files from the camera’s memory card can be annoying since most of them organize store photos in different folders:

Let’s see how we can automate this task in Fileaze.

Creating the job

Let’s create a job in Fileaze to automate our photo download task. Click the “New” button in the toolbar and enter a name for your new job (and an optional description if you wish):

Let’s move to the Sources tab and add a Folder source:

This opens the Folder Source selection dialog:

We need to setup a number of things here.

First of all, let’s select the memory card’s drive unit as the source. You can do this by clicking the dotted button in the Folder pane to open a standard Windows folder browser or input the path in the text field directly. In our case this will be H:\

Then let’s leave the Include subfolders checkbox enabled to have Fileaze dive into all the memory card’s folders and sub-folders.

At this point, what we want Fileaze to do is to find and treat all our photos disregarding of their original positions. To achieve this, let’s uncheck the Keep folder structure checkbox: this will make the operation behave like Windows’ search facility, where you can find and select files as a flat list, no matter where they actually are.

Finally let’s filter out only the files we need. Digital cameras often create support files needed by proprietary applications. Since we don’t want them but only our JPEG photos, let’s click the dotted button in the Folder and file filter pane. This open’s the filter window:

What we have to do here is enable the Folder and filename checkbox at top-left and input the filter pattern. We just need to input the simple wildcard pattern *.jpg in the text field. This means selecting all files that have any filename (the star matches any number of any character) and the jpg extension. Files that cameras store with capital letters in the extension (like 001.JPG) will be included too since we’ll leave the Case sensitive checkbox disabled.

The Folder and filename pane will look like this:

Press Save when you’re done to get back to the New folder source window. If you followed all steps carefully, your window should look like this:

Press save to get back to the job editor:

Now let’s click on the Actions tab and add a new Copy action:

The New copy action window opens. In the Destination folder and filename pane just input the path or click the dotted button to browse to the destination folder where you want all your photos to be copied, in our case c:\all-photos:

We don’t need a specify a filter here since we already filtered our sources to match JPEG files only. Click Save to close this window and return to the job editor. Here click Save again to close the editor. Now our job is created and appears in the main window’s job list:

Select the job by clicking it in the list and click Run to execute the job. If the job was created with the correct parameters what you’ll see is a window similar to this:

Now let’s open the c:\all-photos folder (or your destination folder if different):

Great! All our photos have been copied to the same folder!

Now every time you’ll need to download your photos again, you’ll just have to plug your memory card in, fire up Fileaze and run the Camera photo download job again!

Improving the job

Organizing into date-based folders

One of the first good habits of photo organization is to keep photos ordered by time to make it easier to find them and avoid ending up with thousands of photos in the same folder.

Fileaze can easily create folders when copying or moving files: any folder specified as destination in the copy action, if non existent, will be created. But how do we create folders with the right year and month automatically?

Fileaze supports the use of predefined constants that evaluate at runtime. These constants can be inserted almost everywhere there’s a text input, using the syntax %const_Name% substituting Name with the actual constants. Look at the help files for a complete list of predefined constants.

What we’ll use here are the two constants Year and MonthZeroPad. We use the zeropad version of the month constant to add a leading zero for months before October so that, for example, September evaluates to 09 instead of 9. This makes it easier to sort folders on the disk.

Let’s edit the copy action we created above and change it to this:

We don’t need to do anything else. When we run the job the two folders corresponding to the value of the two constants at runtime will be created if they don’t already exist and what we’ll get is our photos downloaded to this month’s folder:

Parameterizing the card’s drive letter

One thing to keep in mind when dealing with removable devices like memory cards is that there’s no guarantee that they always get the same drive letter in Windows when plugged in, especially if you use more than one device. It would be annoying to edit the job every time there’s a drive letter change so let’s make that a parameter for the job we can specify at first run and change only when needed.

Apart from predefined constants, Fileaze supports the use of custom constants. Custom constants are defined in the job editor’s Advanced tab. Let’s create a new constant named carddrive and give it the h value:

Then let’s change the source selection substituting the h for the drive with the new constant:

When we run the job, Fileaze asks for the value of the constant and lets us specify if we want to keep that value as the default for the next execution. The value is substituted in the folder source and the photo files searched in the correct drive:

Note that this window will pop up at every job run. Now any time there’s a drive letter change we won’t need to edit the job but only to change the value of the constant and press Run!