How to delete “unused” raw files which have no .jpg match?

Question

I shoot RAW+JPG, namely NEF and JPG. After viewing sometimes hundreds of images (using a simple program) and deleting the JPGs, I have many unnecessary leftover NEF files. If there was a script to delete any orphan NEF files in the directory, that would be very helpful. I read a similar question here "How to delete JPG files, but only if the matching RAW file exists?" and the solution presented with the Command Prompt works very well. I was wondering if one was available for my predicament?

Answer 1

I wrote a script in Python to do the work for me. It's called remove-orphaned-raw-images.py and I published it on Github.

Basically it iterates over all the files in a given folder and moves orphaned raw images (in my case *.CR2 files with no matching JPEG) to a backup folder. Optionally you can tell the script to actually delete the files.

Here is an outline of the algorithm:

• Get a list of all the files in the selected directory.
• Sort those files into RAW and JPEG files (append them to separate lists).
• Check for each item in the RAW images list that a match exists in the JPEG list;
  if not, append this image to a list of orphaned raw images.
• Move the images in the list of orphaned images to a backup folder
  (or directly delete them if explicitly wanted).

The tool will tell you how to use it when run with the help option -h on the command line.

This problem also occured to me, which is why I wrote this tool. I'm using my DSLR to take JPEG or RAW+JPEG images, never only RAW. When sorting out blurry or otherwise bad shots, I use the JPEGs to quickly take a look at them and delete the bad ones. This leaves me with left over RAW images of which I deleted the matching JPEGs (for a reason).

Answer 2

Using the question you mentioned - I have written you a script

ok warning! be careful with this script! - MAKE A BACKUP

1) Make a bat file called clean.bat and put it in the dir that you want to work with

2) Then enter the following into the bat file

mkdir keep
for /f "delims==" %%r in ('dir /b *.jpg') do move "%%~dpr%%~nr.nef" "%CD%\keep\" 2> nul
move *.jpg "%CD%\keep\"
del *.nef
del *.jpg
move "%CD%\keep\*.*" "%CD%\"
rmdir keep

3) Open the command prompt as admin and navigate to the folder with the clean.bat 4) run clean.bat

Basically the flow of the script is

• Make a directory called Keep
• Move all matching NEF files to the keep folder
• Move all Jpegs to the keep folder
• Then delete all the files from source folder
• Move the keep files back
• Remove the keep folder

Please, PLEASE test this out!

UPDATE: Made script change to work with folders that have spaces in them

Answer 3

Here's my python script to delete cr2's w/o a jpeg.

It searches recursively within the current directory, ".". It considers all images in all folders.

import os 
import sys

#Searches through the current directory, recursively, looking for any raw
#and jpeg files. It enumerates the jpegs it finds, without the extension, and
#then enumerates the raw files it finds. If it finds a raw file for which no
#jpeg exists, then it deletes the raw file.
#
# This WILL NOT WORK, if there are files with repeated file numbers.
# this will NOT be an issue if there's only one camera. 

# A dict of filename: (rawpath, jpegpath)
files_seen = {}

for (cur_dir, subdirs, files) in os.walk("."):
  for file in files:
    fname, fext = os.path.splitext(file)
    fext = fext.lower()



    if (fext == ".jpg"):
      content = files_seen.setdefault(fname, [None, None])
      # if it is then filenames have du'ped
      assert(content[1] is None)
      content[1] = os.path.join(cur_dir, file)

    elif (fext == ".cr2"):
      content = files_seen.setdefault(fname, [None, None])
      assert(content[0] is None)
      content[0] = os.path.join(cur_dir, file)

#at the end, we look for raw files without a jpeg,

for key in files_seen:
  (raw_path, jpeg_path) = files_seen[key]

  if jpeg_path is None:
    print("Deleting: %s" % raw_path)
    #os.system("pause.exe")    
    os.unlink(raw_path)

print("Done")
os.system("pause.exe")