Improving image workflow using dropbox and exiftool

Hi!
In the last couple of years I have successfully managed to build a pretty decent workflow around my "camera uploads" dropbox folder using Hazel. Images get imported from various cameras/iphones. Pictures presently get renamed using Phil Harveys ExifTool according to the YYYYMMDD-hhmmss_001.jpg scheme pattern and collected hourly into subfolders with the pattern "YYMMDD NEW_hh0000" - which means I get all pictures from a certain date within one hour into a subfolder named like this. After I manually revise the pictures in all folders I replace the "NEW_hh0000" part of the folder with a description of the content. As soon there is no "NEW_" part in the foldername anymore, the folder gets archived (moved) into my picture archive on another harddisk which is in a "/pics/YYYY/YYMMDD Party with Jon in New York" structure.

So far, so good. It has shown that it's quite much work to manually revise the "NEW_" folders and rename them. Sometimes I also need to take out some pictures of the hourly created folders which do not belong to the set of pictures taken in that hour and sometimes I also need to move pictures from several "NEW_" folders into one, because the pictures are geographically related or all the pictures taken saved in different "NEW_" folders belong to an single event, for example, a party with Jon in New York.

I want to improve this routine so I have less manual work. I thought about these steps will be helping me a lot:

1) Hazel should be able to recursively dive from a parent folder into (hundrets) of these "YYMMDD NEW_hh0000" subfolders and get Exiftool to find the coordinates and rename the images.

2) Exiftool or another tool would find the GPS coordinates and will look up into a predefined "geographical keyword database" to see if the GPS location is in a predefined area. If there are new pictures from a location which do not have yet a predefined area, I get asked to predefine it. This means at the end pictures out of the all the hourly subfolders taken within a certain time (usually on the same day) in a certain predefined area they will be renamed according to individual keywords (e.g. "YYYYMMDD-hhmmss Party with Jon in New York.jpg")

3) I want Hazel to sort the images with the same keywords into new subfolders which also contain the keywords of all images (e.g. /pics/YYYY/YYMMDD Party with Jon in New York/YYYYMMDD-hhmmss Party with Jon in New York.jpg")

Is anyone willing to help me with that? I would even pay for help, if some professional Hazel programmers want to offer it, its much appreciated.

Thanks,
Markus

For #1, check out subfolders in the manual. There's a whole chapter on that.

#2 would require some programming. Maybe someone here can offer help on that front though you may also want to check more general programming forums.

Not sure about #3. If there are multiple keywords, which one gets used? Can you provide another example along with an explanation of how it would go through this step?

Hi and much thanks for the reply. I will read more about #1 and also dive into #2, and maybe there is somebody keen on offering programming help. For #3, it all depends how #2 gets solved. Right now Hazel triggers my subfolders and as long it finds "NEW_" in there the folder is untouched. If my workflow can get solved like I imagine it I want Hazel to collect (the renamed) pictures (output of #2 still in their subfolders) but only those which geographically belong to each other taken on the same day out of the subfolders and put they into a new one and the folder should have the name of the keywords given for the pictures e.g. /YYMMDD Party with Jon in New York and in there all the YYYYMMDD-hhmmss Party with Jon in New York.jpg pictures of that day are to be found. It I think for #3 its best to wait until its sure #2 can be solved.

I have done a bit research and came across this awesome posting:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=12569&p=32158#p32158

Basically this is more or less exactly what I wanted to do. I will try to revive the old thread, maybe someone can help there, as I am not sure if I can get www.rubygeocoder.com to run myself.