remove_all_underscored.py

import os
import shutil
to_clean = './compressed'
output = './full_cleaned'
if not os.path.exists(output):
    os.makedirs(output)

def clean(dir:str):
    children = [f'{dir}/{child}' for child in os.listdir(dir)]
    files = [child for child in children if os.path.isfile(child)]
    for file in files:
        file_base = os.path.basename(file)
        print(file_base, )
        if file_base.startswith('IMG_'):
            shutil.copy(file,f'{output}/{file_base}')
            print(f'copy:{file_base}')

clean(to_clean)
print('done!')

remove_extra_folders.py

import os
import shutil

output = './compressed'
if not os.path.exists(output):
    os.makedirs(output)

to_clean = './Masters'

current_root = ''

def clean(dir:str):
    children = [f'{dir}/{child}' for child in os.listdir(dir)]
    
    folders = [child for child in children if os.path.isdir(child)]
    files = [child for child in children if os.path.isfile(child)]

    for folder in folders:
        clean(folder)
    
    for file in files:
        file_base = os.path.basename(file)
        shutil.copy(file,f'{output}/{file_base}')
        print(f'copy:{file_base}')

clean(to_clean)
print('done!')

I had a bunch of old pictures from an ancient IMAC I recovered, that I wanted to remove all extraneous folders and metadata files and BS that makes it harder to browse the raw files. this is because I copied them from iphoto which stores the photos pretty weird.

I used remove_extra_folders.py to basically extract all the files so the messy directory structure is not present.
I used remove_all_underscored.py to remove all metadata files, which weren't photos or videos, just some weird stuff iphoto stores.