Write Images into a custom sub-directories

Retrobatch
1

Hello!

I’m a fresh RB user. My plan is to use RB for automating migration of my large media (mostly photos) into a reasonable folder structure.

_Import - an imput folder with deep sub-folder structure (up to 5 levels)
/input/

├── Phone_backup_2023/
│   ├── DCIM/Camera/IMG_20240315_143022.jpg (EXIF: 2024-03-15)
│   ├── DCIM/Camera/IMG_20240315_143055.jpg (EXIF: 2024-03-15)
│   └── WhatsApp/20231225_family_video.mov
├── Old_drive/
│   ├── Vacation 2022/
│   │   ├── beach1.jpg (File Creation: 2022-07-10)
│   │   ├── beach2.jpg (File Creation: 2022-07-10)
│   │   └── IMG_5432.mov (EXIF: 2022-07-12)
│   └── Photos/Random_mix/
│       ├── vacation.mp4 (no date)
│       ├── random_video.mp4 (no date)
│       └── 2021-05-03_birthday.jpg
├── USB_stick/
│   ├── random_photos/DSC_9876.jpg (EXIF: 2020-12-01)
│   └── videos/clip_final.avi (File Creation: 2019-08-20)
└── Desktop/
├── screenshot_no_date.png (no date)
└── 20240101_newyear.heic

_Export (test in this case) - an output folder with more reasonable sub-folder structure.

/output/
├── photo_valid/
│   ├── 2024/03/15/
│   │   ├── 20240315-000001.jpg
│   │   └── 20240315-000002.jpg
│   ├── 2024/01/01/20240101-000001.heic
│   ├── 2022/07/10/
│   │   ├── 20220710-000001.jpg
│   │   └── 20220710-000002.jpg
│   ├── 2021/05/03/20210503-000001.jpg
│   └── 2020/12/01/20201201-000001.jpg
├── video_valid/
│   ├── 2023/12/25/20231225-000001.mov
│   ├── 2022/07/12/
│   │   ├── 20220712-000001.mov
│   │   └── 20220712-000002.mov
│   └── 2019/08/20/
│       ├── 20190820-000001.avi
│       ├── 20190820-000002.avi
│       └── 20190820-000003.avi
├── photo_invalid/
│   └── screenshot_no_date-000001.png
└── video_invalid/
├── vacation-000001.mp4
└── random_video-000002.mp4

Here is my current workflow:

Screenshot 2026-01-04 at 13.35.28
Screenshot 2026-01-04 at 13.35.28560×780 84.8 KB

Read Folder node is configured to include images in subfolders. I also changed the sort by field to use create date asc.

JavaScript node is used for advanced filtering (mostly if file contains some date in metadata or file name) and is generating a $userValue.fullOutputPath variable which
is used in following Write Images node…this variable is following my sub-folder structure for output folder.

The issue I’m experiencing is that Write Images node implicitly inherits the input folder structure (within my read folder path). I expected that File name field should be relative to Folder field.

For example, if input file is saved in *Import/Vacation 2022/beach2.jpg
I would expect to write it into _*Test/photo_valid/2022/07/10/20220710-000001.jpg

Instead, the file is written into _Test/*Vacation 2022/*photo_valid/2022/07/10/20220710-1.jpg

I see two problems here:

  1. Write Images node is inheriting a relative path from source (Read Folder Node)
  2. FIle number token cannot be set to be for example 6 digits long and is not relative to a given folder, instead, it’s global within a batch - so I can’t simply have a continuous numbers in every output sub-folder.

Any ideas, how to overcome these issues?

2

For the file number with six digits, you can enter this in the write node: $FileNumber06$

For removing the path from where the image was loaded from, you need this bit of JavaScript:

asset.setOutputSubFolder(null);

I need to make this an official API, or some sort of node, and more than just a forum post:

At this point, I think you can assume the API will be stable.

Edit: OK, I’ve made it an official part of the API: https://flyingmeat.com/retrobatch/docs-2.0/jsapi/assetapi/