sort-enrich-photos-strava

Sorting photos against an activity log

The log knows what they did and when; photos carry timestamps. That's enough to file and caption with almost no human input — which is what makes it worth automating, and what makes it dangerous: a wrong rule moves hundreds of files confidently.

So: propose a complete plan, get approval, execute, verify.

This covers what the log can explain, typically ~15% of a camera roll. The rest is the sort-enrich-photos-interactive-clusters skill.

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; the comments explain each field.

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. This is how you avoid Climbing next to an established RockClimbing.

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.