jondot / sq

Magical file grouping

sq - Magical File Grouping

sq finds and groups sequence of file runs that naturally belong together. With sq you can:

• Get rid of that huge downloads folder, by automatically grouping files along your download sprees.
• Save time organizing photoshoots by placing shots that were made around the same time together.
• Stitch a huge list of security camera detection frames into movies or simple gifs.

And more.

Quick Start

If you're on OSX, then:

$ brew tap jondot/tap
$ brew install sq

Otherwise, you can grab a binary from the releases page.

You can then proceed to run sq on a sample directory. Don't worry, by default it will only show you what it wants to do, and it won't actually do it.

$ cd ~/Downloads
$ sq -g '*.*' -d 100

Explore how sq have created groups, by separating groups of files that are more than -d 100 seconds apart. Makes sense? now let's see what you can do with it.

Distance

The concept of distance is very important for sq. It separates groups by their natural distance; it can be file time, exif date, or anything it can parse into a number from a file name (see the --format and --layout flags).

Examples

Sorting Media

Let's say you download legal videos every now and then through RSS feeds. You'd like to bunch up all movies and TV series that were downloaded the same day. Here we go:

$ cd /downloads
$ sq -d 3000 -g '*.avi' -m

This globs avi files, and moves (-m) them under their groups. Every group has a name which correspond to the first file in that group, headed by a group_ prefix (you can change this with -p).

Automating Photoshoot Workflow

If you're a photographer, then much of your time is spent juggling files from various media. You can transform a long list of files into a more informative one, that groups your shooting sessions into folders:

$ cd storage
$ sq -d 1800 -g '*.*' --exif -c

This will create new groups, and copy files into them. When dealing with photography, we want to copy and not move files regardless of which software we use; a photo lost is a moment you can never recreate.

Making Videos

If you have a security camera with a movement detection feature, then it will spit out detection frames now and then. Folders will tend to fill up with detection frames, and it's a lot cooler to just send yourself, or your customers, videos of detections:

$ sq -d 300 -g '*.*' -t -c -s --group-command 'ffmpeg -framerate 2 -i "{{GROUP}}/%d.jpg" -c:v libx264 {{GROUP}}.avi'

This shows an advanced use case: --group-command which takes a command sq runs on each group, the {{GROUP}} template variable that will be used to inject the group name (or location), and -s which will sequence the files; meaning will rename them per group with an increasing number - which makes it easy for ffmpeg to glob with %d.

Note that with ffmpeg you can also glob by a free file name and make a different format of a video:

$ ffmpeg -f image2 -pattern_type glob -i '*.jpg' out.avi

Contributing

Fork, implement, add tests, pull request, get my everlasting thanks and a respectable place here :).

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2015 Dotan Nahum @jondot. See MIT-LICENSE for further details.