How to iterate through and store various images that live in various folders under a root directory in Python?

Question

I have 5 folders f1, f2, f3, f4, f5 and I have several images in each folder.

What I am trying to do is make a dictionary object that holds all images based on their key (which is the folder name) and their value (which is the file names living under that specific folder).

The way I have written this is using os.walk():

import os

dict_object = {}

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(".", topdown=False):
    for file_name in files:
        for dir_name in dirs:
            dict_object[dir_name] = [file_name]

But the output is not quite what I am after as it does not list the file names (values) under the appropriate folder names (keys):

dict_object

{'.DS_Store': [],
 'f1': ['.DS_Store'],
 '.ipynb_checkpoints': ['.DS_Store'],
 'f2': ['.DS_Store'],
 'f3': ['.DS_Store'],
 'f4': ['.DS_Store'],
 'f5': ['.DS_Store'],
 '.': ['.DS_Store']}

And I also do not want to include '.DS_Store': [] and '.': ['.DS_Store'] in the dictionary.

Answer 1

This is how I ended up doing this:

# Define various folders
folders = ["f1", "f2", "f3", "f4", "f5"]
paths = []
file_paths = {}

# Put all paths together
for folder in range(len(folders)):
    paths.append('parentfolder/'+folders[folder]+'/')

    temp_file_paths = [os.path.join(paths[folder], f) for f in os.listdir(paths[folder])]

    if paths[folder] + '.DS_Store' in temp_file_paths:
        temp_file_paths.remove(paths[folder] + '.DS_Store')
    file_paths[folders[folder]] = temp_file_paths

.DS_Store: While it appears to be a useless addition to a folder, a .DS_Store file (the “DS” stands for “Desktop Services”) is important in helping Mac work out how to display folders when you open them. Read more here

Answer 2

You can accomplish the wanted result with a simple recursive function. For unwanted files, you can either filter the dictionary after the function invocation or change the if statement.

def recursive_read(path=".", dict_result={}):
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(path, topdown=True):
        if (root == '.'):
            continue
        if (root in dict_result):
            dict_result[root].append(files)
        else:
            dict_result[root] = files

        for dir in dirs:
            recursive_read(os.path.join(root, dir))
    return dict_result