Copying files using Powershell (SD card to PC)

Copying files using Powershell (SD card to PC)

I’ve got myself a new camera – Yeah 😎
It doesn’t come with any software to copy images etc over. Boo…
It does say you can manually copy from SD to your machine, but frankly that sucks. I expect software to create things like a nice folder structure automatically. I’m not going to copy, create folder(s), paste multiple times each time I take some photos.

It’s a Sony RX10 IV, so it’s not a cheap camera, and after a hunt online there are offerings that Sony say to use, as in the Capture One software. I grabbed that, gave it a go. Had just over a 1000 images on the SD card that I’d taken (the card has a transfer speed of 250 MB/s) so it’s no slouch!

Fire up Capture One (which has a very annoying register interface) and started to transfer the images. All seemed good.

SLOW!!!

After a short time the Capture One software was reporting it would take another 3 hours and 20 minutes to transfer the photos!
Over 3 hours!
What on earth was it doing?
So I canceled and closed it. Reverted back to my Nikon software (used for older camera), after all, all I wished to do was to copy the photos from one location to another, and at the same time get the tool to create a reasonable folder structure at the same time.

Guess how long that took? I didn’t time it, but it was less than a minute, I’d approximate around 30 seconds.

So the issue wasn’t the card or my computer – it was Capture One.

Options

Looked online for other Sony recommendations, but all I could find was others complaining about the Capture One software – from years ago. Could I use the Nikon software? No I couldn’t, it worked fine for the jpg’s, but it was the Sony RAW files that caused an issue. They have a different file extension than what Nikon use. So their tool doesn’t see those files.

Thought, I could write a wee script to change the file extension of the Sony RAW files to the same type as Nikon. That would be simple.
Then I’m like why don’t I just write a bat file to copy across and create the desired folder structure.

Powershell – not bat

Firstly task is the script wants to look at each file, see when it was created. Use that data to then create a folder structure. That, isn’t actually a simple task with bat files, and the recommendation is to use Powershell. 🙂

First powershell script

So I’ve never created a powershell script before, but as you’ll see in the following code it’s dead easy and very simple to work with.

# SD Card location
$inputDir = "G:\"
# Where to copy file to
$outputDir = "D:\myPhotos\"
# get all files inside all folders and sub folders
$files = Get-ChildItem $inputDir -file -Recurse

# Create reusable func for changing dir based on type
function copyFileOfType($file, $type) {
    # find when it was created
    $dateCreated = $file.CreationTime
    # Build up a path to where the file should be copied to (e.g. 1_2_Jan) use numbers for ordering and inc month name to make reading easier.
    $folderName = $outputDir + $dateCreated.Year + "\" + $dateCreated.Month + "_" + $dateCreated.Day + "_" + (Get-Culture).DateTimeFormat.GetAbbreviatedMonthName($dateCreated.Month) + "\" + $type + "\"
	
    # Check if the folder exists, if it doesn't create it
    if (-not (Test-Path $folderName)) { 
        new-item $folderName -itemtype directory        
    }
    # build up the full path inc filename
    $filePath = $folderName + $fileName
    # If it's not already copied, copy it
    if (-not (Test-Path $filePath)) { 
        Copy-Item $file.FullName -Destination $filePath        
    }
}

foreach ($f in $files) { 
    # get the files name  
    $fileName = $f.Name
    if ( [IO.Path]::GetExtension($fileName) -eq '.jpg' ) {
        copyFileOfType -file $f -type "photos"
    }
    elseif ( [IO.Path]::GetExtension($fileName) -eq '.arw') {
        copyFileOfType -file $f -type "raw"
    }
    elseif ( [IO.Path]::GetExtension($fileName) -eq '.mp4') {
        copyFileOfType -file $f -type "movies"
    }
    else {
        #Do nothing
    }    
}

How to run?

Three steps are needed.

  • Copy the above code and paste it into a ps1 file. So give it a name such as transferFiles.ps1 (really doesn’t matter)
  • On the first instance, open Powershell as Admin
    • run this Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
    • this lets you run you script locally, if you don’t do this and try to run any powershell script that you create, it will give an error.
  • Run the script. Either right click and ‘run with Powershell’ or call it from the Powershell cmd.

Explanation – change it?

I’ve included a load of comments, so hopefully it should be clear. Essentially if you want to use it yourself, you will wish to change the

  • $inputDir To wherever you original images are.
  • $outputDir Where you’re existing photo root folder is.
  • $folderName is what I’ve used to define the created folder structure. Feel free to change to your personalisation.
  • The RAW file type extension of Sony is arw. Your type may be different. I split the different file types into different folders. That’s just my preference. Do what you wish.

Result

The above shows what the output is. Simple folder with year, then combined month and day and the named month. The reason I do this is for ordering via the name. If the date was first then you’d get the 1st of each month together, so the whole list wouldn’t be in chronological order when in alphabetical order.

Improvements

  • I could make this happen automatically when the card is inserted into my machine.
  • I could delete the files once it’s copied (and added verification that they’d been copied!).
  • Could add in duplicate coping to my back up NAS drive

Sure with this being my first go at a powershell script there are ‘wrong’ items, but hopefully it will give someone an idea of what to do. Hopefully it works at speed on 1000’s of files as well! I’ve only tested it on a few files right now. Gives me an excuse to go out and fill the camera SD card with a load of photos 🤣

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