Plant Export Photo Renaming

August 2, 2026

Turned iPhone photo captions into a safe bulk-renaming workflow for exported plant images.

Tags: Abbey Root

Plant Export Photo Renaming

Summary

Plant photo intake no longer needs Mac-only title edits or one-album-at-a-time exports. A new Abbey command reads each iPhone caption from the exported XMP sidecar and combines it with the photo’s original capture date to create a descriptive filename.

Accomplishments

• Added abbey plant rename-exports <directory> [--dry-run].
• Kept every image paired with its renamed XMP sidecar.
• Added deterministic numbering when one plant has several photos on the same date.
• Made the operation validate the entire batch and reject collisions before renaming anything.
• Covered successful renames and metadata failures with focused tests.

Lessons Learned

• The caption already entered during phone review is the right source of truth; Abbey should consume that metadata instead of asking for duplicate titles.
• Safe batch automation needs a complete preview and validation boundary before the first file changes.

Next Steps

• Preview a real Apple Photos export with abbey plant rename-exports ~/incoming/photos --dry-run, then run the same command without --dry-run after reviewing the proposed names.