v3.6.0

[jaimetur]

🗓️ CHANGELOG

Planned Roadmap for the following releases
Changelog for the past releases+

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Release: v3.6.0

• Release Date: 2025-08-31

• Main Changes:

  • 🚨 Breaking Changes:

    • Auto-Rename Albums content based now uses as dates separator - instead of . and as group of dates separator -- instead of -. Those separators can be customized using two new parameters (see below).

  • 🌟 New Features:

    • Added new parameter -dateSep, --date-separator <DATE_SEPARATOR> to specify the Dates Separator for the Feature Auto-Rename Albums Content Based.
    • Added new parameter -rangeSep, --range-separator <RANGE_OF_DATES_SEPARATOR> to specify the Range of Dates Separator for the Feature Auto-Rename Albums Content Based.
    • Added new parameter -gpthLog, --gpth-log to Save GPTH log messages into a log file within Logs folder.

  • 🚀 Enhancements:

    • Improvements in Auto Rename Albums Folders feature to Compute the best 'oldest_date' per file using the following priority:

      1. date_dict
      2. EXIF native (piexif)
      3. EXIF exiftool
      4. Filesystem ctime
      5. Filesystem mtime

    • Updated GPTH to version 5.0.2 (by @Xentraxx & @jaimetur) which includes new features, performance improvements and bugs fixing extracting metadata info from Google Takeouts.

      • ✨ GPTH New Features

        • Support for 7zip and unzip extractors (if found in your system). This is because the native extractor does not extract properly filenames or dirnames with UTF-8/latin1 chars.
        • Support new Extra files from Google Takeout with following suffixes: -motion, -animation, -collage.
        • New flag --keep-input to Work on a temporary sibling copy of --input (suffix _tmp), keeping the original untouched.
        • New flag --keep-duplicates to keep duplicates files in _Duplicates subfolder within output folder.
        • New flag --save-log to save log messages into disk file.
        • Created GitHub Action build-and-create-release.yml to Automatically build all binaries, create new release (stable or pre-release), update it wiht the release-notes and upload the binaries to the new release.
        • Step 8 (Update creation time) is now multi-platform. Also update creation date for physical files and symlinks on linux/macos.

      • 🚀 GPTH Improvements

        • Created a single package gpth-lib with all the exported modules for an easier way to manage imports and refactoring.
        • Added new flag fallbackToExifToolOnNativeMissin GlobalConfigService Class to specify if we want to fallback to ExifTool on Native EXIF reader fail. (Normally if Native fails is because EXIF is corrupt, so fallback to ExifTool does not help).
        • Added new flag enableExifToolBatchin GlobalConfigService Class to specify if we want to enable/disable call ExifTool with batches of files instead of one call per file (this speed-up a lot the EXIF writting time with ExifTool).
        • Added new flag maxExifImageBatchSizein GlobalConfigService Class to specify the maximum number of Images for each batch passed in any call to ExifTool.
        • Added new flag maxExifVideoBatchSizein GlobalConfigService Class to specify the maximum number of Videos for each batch passed in any call to ExifTool.
        • Added new flag forceProcessUnsupportedFormatsin GlobalConfigService Class to specify if we want to forze process unsupported format such as .AVI, .MPGor .BMP files with ExifTool.
        • Added new flag silenceUnsupportedWarningsin GlobalConfigService Class to specify if we want to recive or silence warnings due to unsupported format on ExifTool calls.
        • Added new flag enableTelemetryInMergeMediaEntitiesStepin GlobalConfigService Class to enable/disable Telemetry in Step 3: Merge Media Entities.
        • Code Structure refactored for a better understanding and easier way to find each module.
        • Code Refactored to isolate the execution logic of each step into the .execute() function of the step's class. In this way the media_entity_collection module is much clearer and easy to understand and maintain.
        • Adapted all methods to work with this new structure
        • Homogenized logs for all steps.
        • New code re-design to include a new MediaEntity model with the following attributes:
          • albumsMap: List of AlbumsInfo obects, where each object represent the album where each file of the media entity have been found. This List which can contain many usefull info related to the Album.
          • dateTaken: a single dataTaken for all the files within the entity
          • dateAccuracy: a single dateAccuracy for all the files within the entity (based on which extraction method have been used to extract the date)
          • dateTimeExtractionMethod: a single dateTimeExtractionMethod for all the files within the entity (method used to extract the dataTaken assigned to the entity)
          • partnerShared: true if the entity is partnerShared
          • primaryFile: contains the best ranked file within all the entity files (canonical first, then secondaries ranked by lenght of basename, then lenght of pathname)
          • secondaryFiles: contains all the secondary files in the entity
          • duplicatesFiles: contains files which has at least one more file within the entity in the same folder (duplicates within folder)
        • Created internal/external methods for Class MediaEntity for an easy utilization.
        • All modules have been adapted to the new MediaEntity structure.
        • All Tests have been adapted to the new MediaEntity structure.
        • Removed files attribute from MediaEntity Class.
        • Merged media_entity_moving_strategy.dart module with media_entity_moving_service.dart module and now it is stored under lib/steps/step_06_moving_files/services folder.
        • New behaviour during Find Duplicates step:
          • Now, all identical content files are collected within the same MediaEntity.
            • In a typical Takeout, you might have the same file within Photos from yyyy folder and within one or more Album folder
            • So, both of them are collected within the same entity and will not be considered as duplicated because one of them could have associated json and the others not
            • So, we should extract dates for all the files within the same media entity.
          • If one media entity contains two or more files within the same folder, then this is a duplicated file (based on content), even if they have different names, and the tool will remove the worst ranked duplicated file.
        • Moved Write EXIF step to Step 7 (after Move Files step) in order to write EXIF data only to those physical files in output folder (skipping shortcuts).
          • This changed was needed because until Step 6 (based on the selected album strategy), don't create the output physical files, we don't know which files need EXIF write.
          • With this change we reduce a lot the number of EXIF files to write because we can skip writing EXIF for shortcut files created by shorcut or reverse-shortcut strategy, but also we can skip all secondaryFiles if selected strategy is None or Json.
          • The only strategy that has no benefit from this change is duplicate-copy, because in this strategy all files in output folder are physical files and all of them need to have EXIF written.
        • Renamed Step 3: Remove Duplicates to Step 3: Merge Media Entities because this represents much better the main purpose of this step.
        • Performance Optimization in Step 3: Merge Media Entities.
        • Step 3: Merge Media Entities now only consider within-folder duplicates. And take care of the primaryFile/secondaryFiles based on a ranking for the rest of the pipeline.
        • Step 7: Write EXIF now take into account all the files in the MediaEntity file except duplicatesFiles and files with isShortcut=true attribute.
        • Step 6: Move Files now manage hardlinks/juntions as fallback of native shorcuts using API to WindowsSymlinkService when no admin rights are granted.
        • Step 8: Update Creation Timenow take into account all the files in the MediaEntity file except duplicatesFiles.
        • Step 8: Update Creation Timenow update creation time also for shortcuts.
        • Improvements on Statistics results.
          • Added more statistics to Step 3: Remove Duplicate
          • Added more statistics to Step 6: Move Files
          • Added more statistics to Step 8: Update Creation Time.
          • Total execution time is now shown as hh:mm:ss instead of only minutes.

      • 🐛 GPTH Bug Fixes

        • Fixed 3.1.0 #65: Now all supported media files are moved from input folder to output folder. So after running GPTH input folder should only contain .json files and unsupported media types.
        • Fixed 3.1.0 #76: Now interactive mode ask for album strategy.
        • Changed zip_extraction_service.dart to support extract UTF-8/latin1 chars on folder/files names.

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💾 Download

Download the tool either for Linux, MacOS or Windows (for both x64 and arm64 architectures) or Docker version (platform & architecture independent) as you prefer, directly from following links:

Linux::

• Download x64 version
• Download arm64 version

Mac OS:

• Download x64 version
• Download arm64 version

Windows:

• Download x64 version
• Download arm64 version

Docker Launcher:

• Download Docker Launcher

What's Changed

• 3.5.3 by @jaimetur in 3.5.3 #962
• Updated GPTH to version 4.3.1 (by @Xentraxx & @jaimetur) which incl… by @jaimetur in Updated GPTH to version 4.3.1 (by @Xentraxx & @jaimetur) which incl… #963
• v3.6.0 with GPTH v4.4.0 which includes several performance improvemen… by @jaimetur in v3.6.0 with GPTH v4.4.0 which includes several performance improvemen… #964
• v3.6.0 with GPTH v4.4.0 which includes several performance improvements. Auto-Rename Albums content based now uses as dates separator - instead of . and as group of dates separator -- instead of -. Those separators can be customized using two new parameters --date-separator and --range-separator by @jaimetur in v3.6.0 with GPTH v4.4.0 which includes several performance improvements. Auto-Rename Albums content based now uses as dates separator - instead of . and as group of dates separator -- instead of -. Those separators can be customized using two new parameters --date-separator and --range-separator #965
• 3.6.0 by @jaimetur in 3.6.0 #966
• GPTH Update by @jaimetur in GPTH Update #967
• GPTH Update to 5.0.0 by @jaimetur in GPTH Update to 5.0.0 #968
• 3.6.0 by @jaimetur in 3.6.0 #970
• GPTH Update to 5.0.2 by @jaimetur in GPTH Update to 5.0.2 #972
• 3.6.0 by @jaimetur in 3.6.0 #974
• GPTH Update to 5.0.2 by @jaimetur in GPTH Update to 5.0.2 #975
• 3.6.0 by @jaimetur in 3.6.0 #976
• main to 3.6.0 by @jaimetur in main to 3.6.0 #977

Full Changelog: v3.5.2...v3.6.0

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This discussion was created from the release v3.6.0.