Is there a way to organise video files by month in new directories?

Question

I am relatively new to bash. I wanted to know if there was an existing command on Mac OS' terminal to seperate video files by month in new directories. Essentially, this means that if I have videos in a span of 12 months, I would have 12 new directories with the videos put inside.

Otherwise, I was wondering if there was another way I could do this maybe through python to solve such problem.

I was hoping to use this to work with 500+ video files. It would tremendously help me if I could just have a script doing it for me instead of going through them one by one.

Before Script

After Script(Desired Output)

Update (found the solution)

I ended up finding the solution thank you for leading me to the right answer. Now I learnt one new thing today

import os, shutil 
from datetime import datetime

filepath = "/Users/alfietorres/Downloads/"      #base file path 
for filename in os.listdir(filepath):           #iterate through each file in the directory

    r = os.stat(filepath+filename)              #look for the file path and the file name
    d = r.st_birthtime                          #look for the time created 
    date=datetime.fromtimestamp(d)              #assign the details to a date variable

    month_directory = filepath+str(date.month)+"-"+str(date.year)      #use the date variable to create a UNIQUE new directory 
    file_being_moved = filepath+filename        #file the path of the file being moved    

    if os.path.isdir(month_directory) :         #check if the directory is created
        print("directory found ... ")
        shutil.move(file_being_moved,month_directory)   #move the file we are iterating on to the directory
    else: 
        print("creating directory ... ")        
        os.mkdir(month_directory)                       #create new directory 
        shutil.move(file_being_moved,month_directory)   #move items in new directory

Answer 1

You can write a python script that does it for you.

Use os module to get information about your files. Especially creation time:

import os
r = os.stat("path/to/file")
print(r.st_ctime_ns)   # it prints the number of nano seconds since creation (Windows OS)

In order to get the list of files/directories in a directory, you can use os module too:

os.listdir("path/to/directory/")  # you get a list of all files/directories

In order to convert the timestamp into a datetime, you can use datetime module:

from datetime import datetime
d = r.st_ctime_ns // 1000000   # convert to seconds
date = datetime.fromtimestamp(d)
print(date)   ##  datetime.datetime(2019, 3, 19, 5, 37, 22)
print(date.year)  ## get the year
print(date.month)  ## get the month
print(date.day)   ## get the day

Now you have just to compbine these information to organize your files.

Other useful information:

• To create a directory, use os.mkdir("directory name")
• To move a file, use os.rename("old path", "new path")