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Album Reordering — generate-album-order.sh + reorder-albums.sh

Forces a deterministic, chronological ordering of the album grid on the Proton Photos web UI (https://drive.proton.me/u/1/photos/albums).

Why this is needed

The Proton web UI sorts the album grid by album.lastActivityTime descending — the most recently active album is shown first. This field is updated whenever a photo is added to or removed from an album, but is not updated by renames or cover changes.

After an import, lastActivityTime reflects the upload order, not the actual date of the albums, so the grid appears scrambled. The two scripts below make lastActivityTime monotonic with each album's year so the UI shows albums chronologically (newest first).

How the reorder works

Because there is no API to set lastActivityTime directly, the reorder uses the only write that updates it: removing and re-adding a photo from/to each album. The album membership is unchanged — only lastActivityTime moves forward.

The two scripts are separated so the target order can be reviewed and manually edited before anything is modified:

  1. generate-album-order.sh produces a TSV listing every album with its inferred year, oldest first.
  2. reorder-albums.sh consumes that TSV and "touches" each album (remove + re-add its cover photo) in file order, oldest → newest. The last album processed gets the most recent lastActivityTime, so the newest album appears first in the UI.

Important: run reorder-albums.sh only after fix-photo-date.sh has finished. The fix script's album-restore step also bumps lastActivityTime; reordering first would be undone.

Script 1: generate-album-order.sh

Usage

generate-album-order.sh [options]

Options

Flag Description
--cache-dir DIR Directory with per-album JSON caches produced by detect-album-conflicts.sh --cache-dir. Used to infer years for albums whose name has no year, without hitting the API.
--output FILE Write the TSV to FILE instead of stdout.
-h, --help Show the script help.

Output format

Tab-separated, one album per line, sorted by year ascending, then name:

<year>\t<album name>\t<album uid>\t<cover photo uid>

Year inference

  1. A 4-digit year in the album name (leading or embedded) is used directly (e.g. 2025 - Août - Semaine à Rome → 2025).
  2. Otherwise the year is inferred from the majority captureTime of the album's photos, using the --cache-dir cache when available, else a live API call. Albums whose year still cannot be determined are emitted with year 9999 and sorted last.

Albums with no cover photo (empty albums) are skipped — they cannot be touched.

Example

./generate-album-order.sh --cache-dir photo-cache --output album-order.tsv

Script 2: reorder-albums.sh

Usage

reorder-albums.sh --file album-order.tsv [--dry-run] [--yes]

Options

Flag Description
-f, --file FILE TSV input (year\tname\tuid\tcoverPhotoUid) from generate-album-order.sh. Required.
-n, --dry-run Print the order and what would be done, without changing anything.
-y, --yes Skip the confirmation prompt.
--delay SECONDS Sleep between albums so timestamps are distinct (default 2).
-h, --help Show the script help.

Safety

  • If remove-photo fails, the album is skipped untouched.
  • If remove-photo succeeds but add-photo fails, the album UID is reported so the cover photo can be restored manually.
  • Albums without a cover photo (empty albums) are skipped.
  • A state file ($LOG_DIR/reorder-albums-<input>.done) records completed album UIDs, so an interrupted run can be resumed by simply re-running the same command.
  • --dry-run makes no API changes and creates no state entries.

Example

# Preview only
./reorder-albums.sh --file album-order.tsv --dry-run

# Apply (after reviewing/editing album-order.tsv)
./reorder-albums.sh --file album-order.tsv --yes

End-to-end workflow

# 1. (optional) build/refresh the photo cache for year inference
./detect-album-conflicts.sh --cache-dir photo-cache

# 2. Generate the ordered album list
./generate-album-order.sh --cache-dir photo-cache --output album-order.tsv

# 3. Optionally edit album-order.tsv to fix anything manually
#    (e.g. reorder lines, change a year column)

# 4. Dry-run, then apply
./reorder-albums.sh --file album-order.tsv --dry-run
./reorder-albums.sh --file album-order.tsv --yes

# 5. Verify in the web UI: albums should now be newest-first,
#    with the most recently used album at the top.

Environment

Variable Default Description
CLI proton-drive Proton Drive CLI binary.
LOG_DIR $HOME/gphoto2proton/logs Directory for reorder logs and state files.
PROTON_DRIVE_CREDENTIALS_STORE pass Credential store for the CLI.

Dependencies

  • proton-drive CLI (authenticated)
  • jq
  • bash 4+ (tested on 5.2), Linux (GNU coreutils)