That looks a very useful tool, thanks. I think it could be just the thing for bulk renaming photos to standard names.

Thank you for this. I think this has some of the operations I need, I will dig into the code.

So git-annex should let you just pull down the files you want to work on, make your changes, then push them back upstream. No need to continuously sync entire collection. Requires some git knowledge and wading through git-annex docs but the walkthrough is a good place for an overview: https://git-annex.branchable.com/walkthrough/