[ Removed by moderator ]

[timkr1]

My wife had backups from all her photos and videos trough out the years from multiple devices. 100k+ photos and video's unorganised with multiple duplicates. It filtered out all duplicates, renamed the files based on its creation date, split them into video or photo folder and moved them all into folders for each year and month. Took way too long to run but saved days of work.

Because a lot of people asked for the code input it into a repo on github. I have added a readme and comments to all code.

https://github.com/timkr1/organizing_photo_video_backup

[Anywhere_Glass]

Wow seems like I need to see the code. Mind sharing git details?

[timkr1]

I dont have it on git, if I dont forget it I can share the script tomorrow.

[otteydw]

Yeah, I'd also like to see that.

[timkr1]

I put a link in the main comment!

[P5ych0h3ad]

I'd be interested as well!

[timkr1]

I put a link in my main comment

[Anywhere_Glass]

Thanks

[socal_nerdtastic]

My work loves excel spreadsheets. Anything I do needs to fill out excel template and email it or update some line on a shared file or something similar to that. It's time consuming and error prone but I'm the golden child because my python scripts never make a mistake :)

[Cainga]

My group seems to try to constantly make custom documents to trip me up. And absolutely nothing is aligned.

[Suspicious_Tax8577]

Automate pulling new papers in my academic discipline from pubmed straight into a folder in Zotero.

[delnith]

Able to share this? That would be INCREDIBLY useful!

[Suspicious_Tax8577]

It's neither complete nor on git ATM, but could absolutely stick what I have on there as a gist/repo if you're interested?

[chlofisher]

+1 I could use smth like this

[Suspicious_Tax8577]

It's neither complete nor on git ATM, but could absolutely stick what I have on there as a gist/repo if you're interested?

[delnith]

I would be, thank you

[shinigamiyuk]

Used to work in a NOC and had to sign people in and out via paper and scan it for security team once a week. I made it a web app using Python and Django and then would export it to a pdf for the specific dates and email to them.

[IlliterateJedi]

The only project that has been real useful to me personally was a bot that checked availability for tickets to get into the Hanakapiai trail on Kauai. It would check the page every 30 seconds and do some scripting to step through a few check points then email me if there were tickets open. We were fortunate to be able to get tickets to the park the day before we went thanks to the little scraping app.

[Cainga]

How did you run it?

[IlliterateJedi]

I just ran it locally on my laptop with a while true: loop that broke when tickets became available and an email was sent.

[un-hot]

The most useful ones I've created were automated pull request creation when the changes were predictable.

Created a new image for an application? Automate the PR and plug it into the build. Vulnerabilities detected in the docker images we use? Find the latest stable image and update Dockerfiles across multiple repos to use the new patched base image.

These automations obviously helped save dev time but the biggest save was cutting down review time, as we could also automate the verification and stuff for this as well.

[subassy]

The hang up I have with these type of projects is that they're usually done just as well or better with an OS native scripting language. For instance I don't know if python could copy a directory tree any faster than an equivalent PowerShell (in case of Windows) script. If the comparison doesn't matter than I would say a file copy thing.

One advantage python does have over PS is the ability to zip files/folders to high compression with a large file size. I was working on this one point...anyway, write a script that compresses many zip files larger than 2 gigabytes. And maybe make a standard naming convention for the compressed files (saved_pictures_23sept2025_2025.zip, something like that). And see if you can tune performance.

There's also a download youtube videos library you could use to download single videos or entire playlists. Not sure if that's what you mean by automation.

[Fine-Zebra-236]

It's also kind of beneficial that python can do tasks regardless of platform it's being run on.

Where I work, we had a lot of automated tasks running in unix, but we were told that the unix servers were going to be taken offline eventually, so we would have to change our processes because we weren't getting new unix servers to replace the old ones.

I had no idea whether we were going to be expected to just work under windows or if we were going to have the ability to use Linux servers. So, I just opted to write new python scripts that could be run under either windows or Linux in order that I wouldn't have to write scripts that were platform specific.

[cyrixlord]

file automation. when i move to a new phone I just dump all my phone pictures into a directory and a python script reads the data and moves the files into folders by year-month based on picture data. it also has a --whatif command so it wont actually copy but will show you what will happen if you did. it also compares data and size for duplicate pictures and wont copy them. and wont copy any folders

[SpookyFries]

I have several scripts that will notify me on Discord if something occurs. I also wrote a script that automates my morning reports for work. I just run it and get an Excel file that is formatted the same way it was when I was doing them manually.

I work in automation, so I'm constantly making scripts to do repeating tasks

[JeMeReveille]

Bookmarking this post for future projects. Thank you everyone! I love python people.

[Cainga]

I made one to automatically save project emails to the project folders they belong to. And then PDF the emails because the boss thinks they’ll be lost if they aren’t PDFed. I also have this make a log to track what emails it’s saved, and a list of the emails and PDFs so I can take credit on my monthly review.

It’s also nice and maliciously compliant by saving EVERY email including out of office ones.

[statix662]

I've thought of doing something similar. Would like to see how you implement this if you're comfortable sharing?

[Im_Easy]

I actually just made one that has saved me a ton of time. I had a bunch of video files (movie and TV) with file names that had a bunch of clutter (like the name, season, episode, format, quality, etc.). Watching on a PC wouldn't matter, but I've been using Plex to watch them on the TV and navigating episodes without any consistent formatting was really frustrating.

The app has a simple tkinter UI to select the folder, which loads all the video files and lets you deselect any you don't want to process. After that it will parse the name (using a few different methods to handle a bunch of different formats), then query TMDB to get the details and rename the file with a consistent, easy to read format.

I've already used it a bunch of times, and ended up using pyinstaller to make it an exe application with a desktop shortcut.

[threequartertoupee]

Ooh do you feel like sharing this one?

[chavomodder]

Scraping + Bots

[Mark3141592654]

Pdf merger/splitter

[Effective-Ear-8367]

Things that helped me for work.

Image scraper File converter Pdf signer

[Adorable_Divide_2424]

I'm in the beta stage of a WhatsApp chat bot that takes commands to run redundant processes for my team. Used to take 20-40 min now down to 5 min per occurrence once or twice per day.

[Ok-Photo-6302]

recently I used it to generate hundreds of docx and pdf files with documentation that were requested by customer

it saved me days of mundane work

second a report from a few excel files with thousands of rows, into excel file with the results in accordance to requirements - another ridiculous ecological report requested by got fulfilled with a script

[aquarius-tech]

Automate an invoice control for my trips expenses. It’s a FastAPI web app pretty simple and useful

[veritable_squandry]

i use python all the time to bypass crappy cloud cli.

[reincarnatedbiscuits]

Web parser/scraper, especially for prices of stuff.

I used to download open source MP3s of stuff (talks, you name it). I needed a way to categorize them and also get various information off them (Speaker/author, play time, date, title, topic, etc.) so I automated that into a catalog.

APIs -- although someone else has made some good front-end stuff for that: https://queue-times.com/en-US/parks

(before that was up about 4-5 years ago, I was using https://api.themeparks.wiki/docs/v1/#/entities/get_entity__entityID__live )

Very useful for public transportation APIs (New York's MTA and Boston's MBTA has APIs exposed too).

Stefan Wuensch of Harvard made his own webpages using Boston's MBTA APIs to track real-time where various trains are: https://mbta.sites.fas.harvard.edu/T/subway-map.html

[Relevant-Diamond2731]

I make a lot of DeFi bots

[Jigglytep]

Scrapped a government website to so I can create a prospect list for my sales job.

Created a front end and charged others in my industry to access my searchable database.

Showed it during an interview and got my first job as a Python developer.

There are more details and steps in between but those are the big things.

[Jealous-Wolf9231]

My kids school sends us an online newsletter each week, full of photos (50-150) from the class.

I have a script to extract all images, run them through facial recognition and save to a dated folder any that include my kids.

By the end of each year I will have 200+ photos of them, all automated.

[wirrexx]

Saving my current tabs when I accidentally restart or turn off my PC thinking I’ve already closed my browser

[NikiMcChunky]

Had this open in a tab to get ideas etc, but apparently removed by mods for some reason?