Specify Attachment Parser

The Specify Attachment Parser is a Java based command line tool that compares a file system directory to attachments in Specify and identifies the files not present in Specify.

The tool will optionally copy the identified files to a target directory. The tool also accepts a regular expression to match or exclude files from source directory.

We wrote the parser becasuse we had a directory with 3k+ images, of which an unknown number were attached in Specify. Using the Specify attachment import wizard was not an option, as it will re-import and duplicate the images already present in Specify. The Specify Attachment Parser allowed us to rapidly identify the 466 images missing from Specify, copy them to a target directory, and use the Specify attachment import wizard to attach them.