Copying only JPG from a directory structure to another location Linux

Question

I wish to recursively go through the folders of a directory structure and copy any .jpg I find into another directory.

I think I had the wrong idea with:

cp -R photos/*.jpg /cpjpg

How can I do this from the command line in Ubuntu?

Answer 1

This will copy all files ending in .jpg or .jpeg (case insensitive as well) in the current directory and all its subdirectories to the directory /cpjpg. The directory structure is not copied.

find . -type f \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.jpeg" \) -exec cp '{}' /cpjpg \;

Answer 2

This preserves the directory structure:

rsync -av --include='*.jpg' --include='*/' --exclude='*' SRC DST

see http://logbuffer.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/linux-copy-only-certain-filetypes-with-rsync-from-foldertree/

Answer 3

This will preserve the directory structure.

find photos/ -type f \( -iname '*.jpg' -o -iname '*.jpeg' \) -print0 |xargs -0 tar c |(cd /cpjpg ; tar x)