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I have found here on AU and elsewhere that Shotwell can import files and organise them into folders/subfolders by date (yyyymm, yyyy/mm/dd, and so on).

Can I import files, assign them to events, and have them organised into folders by event? Something like Pictures/Event A, Pictures/Event B, or (even better) Pictures/201111/Event A, Pictures/201111/Event B, Pictures/201112/Event C.

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Not yet. Shotwell can organize your photos into folders by time only, like the first link you have. To achieve what you want you need to use the Hierarchical Tags feature in Shotwell. This isn't exactly what you want though, so the short answer is no.

Have a look in Preferences/Library/Importing/Pattern: and click (Help) for a list of exactly the time-based metadata Shotwell can organize by.

If you are just wanting to separate out groups of photos to export, you can select a group of tagged photos and export them to a new folder. From there, you could manually reorganize your Pictures directory structure in the file browser.

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    thanks tom, it's a pity but at least now I know (and can maybe add a request :) ) - my overall goal is to use but not rely on the Shotwell database and store all the organisational info in file metadata and folders, so that I/someone else can browse the folder/move it around/to another OS (!) without losing data - maybe what I want to do for now is organise the Pictures subfolders myself and use Shotwell just for adding/changing metadata and GUI-based browsing
    – lofidevops
    Dec 14, 2011 at 10:24
  • I'll bet this could be done via a script, once the tags are added to the files. You would need to have the script do the organizing of files, and have Shotwell just monitor your Pictures folder for changes (but not do any organizing). That's probably another question though? Someone smarter than me will have to answer that. Maybe even a future Shotwell plugin... Dec 14, 2011 at 11:12
  • Not update to be made since 2011? This is so obvious as a needed feature! May 11, 2014 at 12:49

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