Automatically renaming and moving files from a single folder to many folders

[ryoso]

Heyo.  I'm a new Bridge user and a pic junkie hoping to make some rapid progress organizing my vast collection.

It's going to be slower going on my phone pics, but I think I can make some rapid progress on pics from friends and family from FB, which have file names incorporating their user names (looking something like AName_A134103314etc . . .).  I would like to group these pics by the person that took the pic and subdivide each person's picks by *approximate* year (doesn't need to be perfect).  Further, I want to change the file name to sequential numbers within each year.

So here's what I'm doing so far.  I've gathered all my pics into one folder: ALLPICS.  Then I sort in Explorer to arrange by alpha filename.  Then in Bridge, I open ALLPICS.  I scroll to the files with the usernames.  Highlight AName_A's pics for a given year (say 2016).  Right click>Batch Rename>Move to other folder (ALLPICS/ANameA/2016);  New filename, sequence number, 01, two digits>Rename.  Then I repeat for the 2017 pics, then 2018.  Then I move on to AName_B's pics.  Etc.

While all this clicking in Bridge has been quicker than doing everything in Explorer, it seems like I should be able to accomplish the desired end faster than I currently know how to do.  Would any of you have some good suggestions?  Even if it's "read X and Y" or "look at tutorial Z on youtube", that's fine.  If subdividing by year will greatly slow down a solution, I could just forget about that in Bridge and divide them up in Explorer later.  If what I really need is to write some sort of script, where in the world do I start?

Thank you for your time, folks.

[Lumigraphics]

Bridge can be extended by scripting but unless you already have experience with JavaScript and general programming, it can be really rough. There are a lot of bugs and things to workaround.

Download the Bridge SDK and install the ExtendScript Toolkit app to get started. Good luck.

Adobe Bridge SDK & Scripting guides for developers | Adobe I/O

JavaScript development toolkit | Download Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit CC

[Stephen Marsh]

As I can’t write scripts, I use ExifTool:

https://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/#filename

As an example, the following Mac OS command will move files to auto generated and nested sub folders based on origination date year, month, day (Win OS users should use straight double quotes):

exiftool '-directory<${directory}/${datetimeoriginal}' -d '%Y/%Y-%m/%Y-%m-%d' 'PATH TO INPUT FOLDER'

Many more examples including file renaming and moving files can be found at the forum:

ExifTool Forum - Index