Email Photo Gatherer

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 21:21:47 -0800

Does anyone happen to know of an application or script that will collect photos from an email account?

The use-case: I am on the yearbook team this year for my kids school. Parents are sending photos to an email address that I am taking over. Could I forward those emails to my own email server and have some script look for photos and gather those together, perhaps sort them by meta-data?
If I can think of this, then I bet someone has already done it.

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Marshall Sutherland

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 22:40:24 -0800

Searching around, I'm seeing lots of results with python scripts to do this sort of thing.

Waitman Gobble

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 23:00:18 -0800

You can use python or PHP or Perl to run through an mbox file and strip out attachments

Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

You have one or more mail messages with MIME attachments, and you want to process these messages with a Perl program to extract files or otherwise manipulate attachments. Formally, a MIME message has only two parts: the head (containing headers such as From and Subject) and the body (containing the message, rather than its metadata). The body, howe...

Mail::Mbox::MessageParser

A fast and simple mbox folder reader

There's also The Bat which is scriptable. It's a pretty good email client.

Save Attachments Automatically

In The Bat! email client, you have multiple ways to quickly and easily save attached files: save all attachments from multiple selected messages or automatically save attached files from incoming messages.

Marshall Sutherland

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 09:59:38 -0800

For some reason, this little project intrigues me (perhaps because I haven't exercised my newly learned python skill in a couple weeks), so I went looking to see what python email libraries are out there and discovered this, which looks to be exactly what you want. Meta data could be collected in a log as it goes or, if limited in scope, could be added to the filenames.

jamesridgway/attachment-downloader

Simple tool for downloading email attachments for all emails in a given folder using an IMAP client - jamesridgway/attachment-downloader

Adam Robertson

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 15:29:55 -0800

@Marshall Sutherland Thanks for investigating this. That looks like the type of thing I need. I will check it out sometime tomorrow and report back.
I think that, coupled with some sort of photo organizer will do just the thing I am after.

Adam Robertson

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 13:17:11 -0800 last edited: Sun, 07 Feb 2021 13:17:58 -0800

I had time to play around with attachment-downloader today, and after some trouble-shooting and playing around with file-naming I have it working.
I will be using this in conjunction with another python script called sortphotos to run a scheduled task that downloads all attachments, names them with the date of the email, the subject, and the name of the image, then all of that gets sorted into a folder by year/month/day

Perfect!!

Marshall Sutherland

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 13:20:10 -0800

awesome!