I think you’ve hit the nail on the head so to speak…it’s just too small/custom a thing for anyone to have built a dedicated tool it seems. In the end I am looking at using my file manager (nautlius) to automatically run a custom exiftool/bash script on chosen files so I can just click and rename/fix metadata etc as I browse through the files. Probably good enough for now.

💯 ! I been considering git-annex too which might let me treat all the photos like any git repo without the bloat.

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/