sort-enrich-photos-interactive-clusters

Sorting a camera roll by day clusters

A classification problem, not a file-moving one. Moving files is trivial; deciding where each photo belongs is the hard part, and the person you're working with is the only one who knows what a given Tuesday was.

Do all the mechanical work and bring them in only where their knowledge is required. Their attention is the scarce resource — spend it on the biggest groups first.

Files move and metadata is rewritten in place, so: show the plan, get approval, execute.

For photos an activity log can match automatically, use sort-enrich-photos-strava.

Conventions come from the library

No settings file. Tunable knobs and per-run decisions live in scripts/sort_photos.py — read it before filling it in.

Everything else comes from looking at the library:

• Copy the folder layout already in use. Don't assume a shape — it might be <year>/<date>_<place>/, Events/<name>/, or a flat pile. The script takes a literal relative path of any depth, so any layout works. Sample a few places; conventions drift over years.
• Read the tag facets before inventing a tag, to avoid Holidays next to an established Holiday.

Tags can be hierarchical: levels separated by |, e.g. Places|Canada|Ontario or Activities|Hiking — the darktable and Lightroom convention. A search for Places|Canada finds everything below it, and a search for Ontario finds it at any level. Matching ignores case, and the scripts never add a tag the sidecar already has in another case: they keep the existing spelling. Facet keys are paths, ancestors included, so the facets show which hierarchy the library already uses. Put a new tag under an existing root rather than starting a parallel tree; keep hierarchies short and stable, and don't invent deep trees nobody asked for. A flat tag is fine when the library has no hierarchy for it.

Nothing to copy — empty library, first sort — means proposing two or three concrete shapes with examples and confirming once. It's the hardest decision to undo: a thousand files under a disliked scheme is a thousand files to move again.