Automatically group real estate bracketed photos by shared EXIF metadata — preparing them for HDR blending via ML models.

Real estate photographers often capture multiple photos of the same angle at different exposure levels ("brackets") to later merge them into one HDR image.

This script takes a folder containing photo shoots (each in its own subfolder), extracts EXIF metadata, and groups the bracketed photos that represent the same angle.

• Groups are formed based on:
  • Matching focal length, aperture, image dimensions
  • Timestamps within a small time window (e.g. 15 seconds)
  • Similar exposure compensation (e.g. +0, -2, +2)
• Handles edge cases like:
  • False positives due to same camera settings
  • Exposure jumps indicating different scenes
• Outputs a dictionary of groupings:

  {
      1: ['shoot_1/IMG_001.jpg', 'shoot_1/IMG_002.jpg'],
      2: ['shoot_1/IMG_003.jpg', 'shoot_1/IMG_004.jpg', 'shoot_1/IMG_005.jpg'],
      ...
  }