Please help me sort out 15 years worth of photos!

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InTheCube

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I have around 200GB+ worth of photos and videos, mostly of family, holidays, weddings, friends, work trips, fishing trips, hiking trips and much more, taken over the last 15 years since my first camera-phone, my trusty old Nokia 7210 (yes the picture quality was horrible, but there are memories in these blurry pixelated photos that I'd like to keep).

The photos and videos are scattered across different folders, online storage, Plex media server, and backup devices. A small portion about 10% is somewhat organised into folders labelled according to year and event/type of album. The rest is a mess. There are duplicates all over the show, backups of backups, media recovered from drives that failed (so the files have weird names, and some meta-data might have been lost).

Every-time I try to get down to sorting the mess out, I find the task too daunting and get distracted doing other online things.

I want to get everything into one place, sort it into some logical structure with years or categories or events or something (I don't really know what this should be), remove duplicates, back it up, and then put it onto a media server to be enjoyed as the years go by.

I'm hoping to find a future-proof solution, if such a thing exists. It must allow me to easily add more photos and albums over the years, without having to do a big conversion or find a new solution years down the line.

The plan is to also scan older printed photos, and add them to the collection.

Please help!
 
Any DAM software should be able to sort everything chronologically for you with ease. Fortunately 200gb isn't a lot so the first step would probably be to get a copy of everything in one place.
 
You have something future-proof, it's called the directory structure. You just need to take the time to use it properly as no software would really be future-proof. First get a program to scan for all the duplicates after you move everything in one place. I use duplicate file finder but it's rather generic so you may not find the same one. Then to organise them use IrfanView. It also has a thumbnail view and various other options to move and copy to different folders.

No other way really to do it.
 
This is what I did.
I used windows search to find all my jpegs, bmp, png and whatever other picture format I could find. I created another folder and copied everything into that folder.
I use DoubleKiller (200kb application or so) to find all duplicate (crc, file name and so on...) - This is the best application for duplicate music files in my opinion, THE BEST!!!.
Anyway, deleted the dupes, then proceeded to delete the crap.
I uploaded all my pictures to Google Drive last week.

I need to uploaded my 32gigs of music that I actually listen to to some cloud storage as well.
 
CamiKaze said:
This is what I did.
I used windows search to find all my jpegs, bmp, png and whatever other picture format I could find. I created another folder and copied everything into that folder.
I use DoubleKiller (200kb application or so) to find all duplicate (crc, file name and so on...) - This is the best application for duplicate music files in my opinion, THE BEST!!!.
Anyway, deleted the dupes, then proceeded to delete the crap.
I uploaded all my pictures to Google Drive last week.

I need to uploaded my 32gigs of music that I actually listen to to some cloud storage as well.
Click to expand...

^ +1 on Doublekiller for removing duplicates once you know what directories everything is in.
 
Normally use Linux for handling photos, but just did a quick experiment in Windows 7. In Windows Explorer create a new directory and then right-click on it and select properties. Under the Customize tag go to "Optimize this folder for" and select Pictures. Inside the directory right click on the title bar at the top to add columns and select "Date taken" as a new column. Now you can sort the photos by the date taken and copy the files to new directories by year or month, depending on your inclination.

...And do run Doublekiller before you do this.
 
Thanks for the replies. I was afraid that the best solution would end up being the manual one. Was hoping there was some kind of silver bullet to kill this problem with.

So the first step I guess is to remove all the duplicates. I see that "Duplicate file Finder" and "DoubleKiller" was mentioned for music files. Will these work for image files? Or are they generic by comparing file properties and attributes? I think I will need something a bit more intelligent than can compare image data. There are a lot of photos that were recovered from a hard drive that died, and a cellphones that also died. The image data was recovered in tact, but a lot of the file properties and attributes were lost, as well as meta-data within the JPEG.

I'll have to sort those out by hand if I can't find an app to assist.

Google photos sounds cool, but that 16MP limit won't work for me, and it doesn't seem to allow categorisation
 
Saajid said:
Thanks for the replies. I was afraid that the best solution would end up being the manual one. Was hoping there was some kind of silver bullet to kill this problem with.

So the first step I guess is to remove all the duplicates. I see that "Duplicate file Finder" and "DoubleKiller" was mentioned for music files. Will these work for image files? Or are they generic by comparing file properties and attributes? I think I will need something a bit more intelligent than can compare image data. There are a lot of photos that were recovered from a hard drive that died, and a cellphones that also died. The image data was recovered in tact, but a lot of the file properties and attributes were lost, as well as meta-data within the JPEG.

I'll have to sort those out by hand if I can't find an app to assist.

Google photos sounds cool, but that 16MP limit won't work for me, and it doesn't seem to allow categorisation
Click to expand...

Doublekiller works on anything. It doesn't care what type of file it is. I only used the music reference because I am cleaning out my music library from time to time.
I have used it for photos.
It checks the CRC, file name, size and another option if you want.
 
Saajid said:
So the first step I guess is to remove all the duplicates. I see that "Duplicate file Finder" and "DoubleKiller" was mentioned for music files. Will these work for image files? Or are they generic by comparing file properties and attributes? I think I will need something a bit more intelligent than can compare image data. There are a lot of photos that were recovered from a hard drive that died, and a cellphones that also died. The image data was recovered in tact, but a lot of the file properties and attributes were lost, as well as meta-data within the JPEG.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately they only look for duplicate files and not images. So even if the images are the same but the meta data different they won't show up. You'll have to find something that looks to image data specifically if you want to do that.
 
I've been looking at this Google Photos thing... hmmm. I just have one problem, I don't want this retarded Google+ to access these photos.
 
One drive also started doing categorization of photos.. Otherwise i would suggest Adobe Lightroom
 
Does picasa which is made by google do the things that you need?

I don't know if google is still maintaining this product.
 
CamiKaze said:
I've been looking at this Google Photos thing... hmmm. I just have one problem, I don't want this retarded Google+ to access these photos.
Click to expand...

How would google + access it? Was under the impression all pics and vids are private unless set to public

Or is that google drive?
 
Can Google Photos geo-locate your photos for you automatically?
 
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