Photo organizer
6So I am pulling years and years worth of pictures and duplicates of pictures from several different hard drives and computers. I know that I have duplicates and possibly worse of images.
A question for those of you that keep on top of your pictures, what software would be the best for de-duplicating and organizing all of these pictures?
I know I can Google this, but I wanted input of actual users.
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I haven’t found anything I liked since Google shuttered Picasa. I know that’s a worthless comment for your goal, but maybe I can learn something here too. Or I can just let my photos go feral like I’ve been doing in the intervening years.
Google Photos is not bad on my phone. It even uses machine learning for searches, so I can search dogs for instance and see photos with my dogs. But that doesn’t resolve photos on the computer. Although maybe you can mass upload to the site from your PC. But that’s not managing them locally.
Congrats on proposing not to just let the photos run wild and hide out in strange places. I’ll be interested to see if you come up with something that works well for you.
I opened the drawer of my wife’s desk and inside was a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premier 2018 that we had purchased probably two years ago and she never installed.
The first thing it says inside the flap is photo organization… I’ll be installing that tomorrow (today).
I’ve moved a bunch to a dedicated drive (250GB SSD) on my media PC and share them via Plex.
My dad recently went into assisted living and his technique was to copy entire folder trees of pictures and files over and over with no real organization. I guess it was his way of “backing up”. Over 200,000 pictures and files were recovered, and after de-duping, down to about 1,500 or so individual unique pictures and files.
The way that works for me to organize pictures is by year then by month then and day. The pictures are named after the day they were taken and a 2-digit sequence number with something about the pictures taken that day for context. If all the pictures that day are related to an event, I will add that to the day’s folder name.
Example:
/Photos/2007/2007-08/2007-08-04/2007-08-04-01-Disney Trip-Day 1.jpg
Going back, the thing that helps me organize them and refreshes my context when seeing them is the date they were taken.
It also helps to cull them, keeping the best ones, because do you really need 15 pictures of your kid’s 4th birthday party 20 years later of your kid opening each present when you don’t remember any of the kids or their parents names?
Even roughing them out by the year they were taken helps. Once you have them sorted by year, month, and day, then I started de-duping.
If I didnt know the day, the picture went in the month folder, and if i only knew the year, it went in the year folder. So don’t worry if you dont know the exact date the picture was taken.
Also, I think the old Picasa standalone program still works on Windows 10.
The magic part of Picasa was to attach tags and metadata to any picture, and then sort and search by any of it (in addition to the face recognition parts).
So I’m guessing your question really has two parts - how to de-dupe them and how to organize them for easy viewing and searching. And file system naming sucks because you can only organize them one way. Since the one thing that every photo has, irrespective of the content or context in which it was taken, is the date it was created. That’s why I organize by date in the folders and filnames.
@mike808 I second the use of filename changes. I use a free app called ExifRenamer for Mac that will automatically change the file name to the date and time in the exif data. You can add prefixes or suffixes if you want. It has an extra field for duplicates so you can find them easily. There’s probably an equivalent for Windows
@bluebeatpete Love ExifRenamer! I keep a shortcut in my camera folder then rename as soon as I put photos on my PC.
I also use this little program for mass renaming files, for example remove “img_” from 100 files without changing the rest of the name. http://www.1-4a.com/rename/
TL;DR version
De-duping
Duplicate Cleaner from https://digitalvolcano.co.uk/
The free version works fine for basic de-duping. The paid version is $40, and does more kinds of file matching.
Photo Organization
With a bonus for an option for long term (as in pass down to your kids) cloud storage/archiving:
Forever Historian (https://Forever.com/historian). Free trial only, paid version is $80 ($56 with CELEBRATEMAY20 code for 30% off).
The Forever storage optional feature integrated into the software is very interesting. Basically you pay for “forever storage”, up front or in installments, and it is not like cloud storage that you rent with no guarantees your files won’t go away or lose them when you pass away or are otherwise incapacitated. With Forever storage, it is more like an asset that you own and as such gets inherited like anything else you own. In comparison, Google doesn’t owe your survivors anything after your account lapses - not even access to your account - if you don’t set that up yourself. Otherwise you are SOL for your Gmail, ProtonMail, Apple, Facebook, Instagram, Finsta, Meh.com and Mercatalyst account, bank, credit card, and all of your other online accounts.
I suggest giving your survivors a copy of your current password, like on a sequestered regular recent backup of just your password vault (you make those, right?) on an encrypted drive with an “open in case of emergency” envelope with the encrypted thumb drive’s password (and a copy of the disk encryption software you used!). I use VeraCrypt for that (TrueCrypt’s successor) at https://www.veracrypt.fr/ . Then you can make copies of the thumb drive and give to relatives you trust and the envelopes to the same relatives or different ones or your lawyer/executor to use on the encrypted drives (that you replace/update regularly every year or so, right?)
there is a setting in google somewhere where you can say if you don’t log in after a certain amount of time then allow so-and-so to access your account. and you can fine-tune what exactly so-and-so will have access to.
if i don’t log in for 3 months then my mom can get into most of my stuff.
@katylava That would definitely be a good product improvement if they don’t have that already. I am sure there would be folks who would be interested in this: my significant other can see everything but the art porn photos I took and those photos documenting my criminal activity. LOL.
@katylava @Kidsandliz
Keep in mind that Google has no guarantees that they will actually keep or restore your data. They only promise a “reasonable effort” in exchange for you giving them access to everything, even if you pay for storage.
Google and its “free” cloud apps with their storage of your data are not a backup service with SLAs to deliver such. If your data is on a hard drive that goes south and they lose your data, well, too bad for you. It isn’t likely, but you are not protected like you think you are.
@mike808 I’m fully aware
@mike808 sorry, i meant to say i’m fully aware but that’s a good thing to point out for others
I am going to try something new for mine. I like the idea for naming by dates so I am going to steal it. The new thing is a document that identifies the pictures in more detail to go with the picture files. For example, picture 10May201 is Mother’s Day at speediedelivery’s house with jst1ofknd. Microsoft word tables was recommended to me but I have not used it recently. I am more of a spreadsheet or database fan. Anyway I can add the detail I want without weird picture names to explain. I was talking to someone who did this method and liked it.
I have Picasa and like it for the bit I have used it (again not recent). I got frustrated with organizing the pictures I was scanning and quit.
I know I have tons of duplicates and more. I made copies of copies on purpose to try out filters and enhancements. I have a hard time with that delete button.
@speediedelivery Yes I like databases too. In many ways a “smart” database is far more useful than parking things in folders.
@Kidsandliz @speediedelivery
One of the things I found out about the Forever Historian program is that it can add (merge in) the tags and metadata you add to the pictures in the program. It rather you can “share” or export the pictures, and you can choose to add in the extra notes directly into the image file.
No separate table or document needed.
Also, name your albums with the date first, so they’ll stay in chronological order.
Trust me, 10 years later, you won’t remember the differences between your kid’s 6th birthday party or their 7th. Having the year in the folder name helps.
e.g. 2005-08/2005-08/2005-08-08-mikejr-bday-party-01.jpg
This would go in the “2005-08 Mike Jr Bday Party” album, for example.
@mike808 That’s a good point about the date.
Here’s my approach (buckle up):
I simply gave up.
At least with regards to my everyday photos.
The weird thing is, I’ve never enjoyed my old photos more than now!
I’ve been into photography since the dark (room) ages, and easily have several hundred thousand pics. When I went digital I always kept to popular categorizing systems, file-naming conventions; a folder for RAW, a folder for JPEG, a folder for smaller JPEG… etc etc. Then I transitioned to Lightroom, and tagging, and letting it handle things, and all of the above became super easy, but it was still somewhat a hassle.
Now, however, I only use Lightroom for my serious photography. Mainly because of how I can cull through hundreds of photos from a shoot, tweak some basics, do heavy lifting in Photoshop… and yet still find everything related to one shoot in one place.
As to my everyday snapshots though… there’s just too much to handle without it being yet another aint-nobody-got-time-for-this chore. I’ve just been dump- er- uploading them automatically, just seconds after being taken, to Google Photos (yeah yeah and letting them snoop through every detail). The things you can find are simply astonishing at times. For people and pets, you tell Photos the name that goes with a face one time, and it does an astonishing job of finding that same person even with different hairstyles, way older or younger, in profile, etc. Wondering what brand was Betsy’s tricycle?.. let’s see “Hey Google, show me photos of Betsy from my photos” “Hey Google, show me photos of tricycles from my photos”. “Thanksgiving 2012”… Ok, you get the pic- (sorry). I can find absolutely anything with more precision than ever without every tagging or categorizing a thing.
Ok, so finding any pic with zero effort is super, but where I reeeeally enjoy this stuff is with having Photos as the random feed for a smart display or your phone or laptop’s screen saver. Tell Google what types of photos you want displayed; from your whole catalog, or just a specific list of names of certain friends, family, pets etc. And that’s all you’ll see, without you having to pick the photos out yourself. I find this makes my old photos suuuuper enjoyable. I have a Lenovo smart display by the living room and you can’t help looking at it every so often to see what old pic will pop up next. Sure, you can get a digital picture frame and fill a memory card with your pics (BTDT), but at the end of the day, it will only show what you put in there and winds up getting ignored. Kind of like having all of your music on an SD card vs something like Pandora figuring out what you like and DJing new music for you. With Photos, it’s constantly surprising you with memories you forgot about. Then it kicks it up a notch by showing you before and after type stuff. Matching color themes. How they’ve grown. Five years ago today. On the display, your laptop, phone, TV… wherever you access the Photos service.
Caveats… Google Photos is only free if you let them crunch your photos a bit. I’m perfectly ok with this for snapshots being seen on screens. If there ever were a need to access the full version of one of these, just have Google find it with it’s uber searching skills, then search your local full-sized backups (that you crudely saved in a local drive, no tagging nor special sorting) for just that file name. If you want to eliminate having to also keep a local full-sized backup (and you trust Google as your only repository), you can choose to upload original quality files, but then you only get 15gb of free space. I believe 100gb is $2/month and 1TB would be $10. BTW, here’s an ironic secret for iPhone users: Apple’s image compression (HEIC) is so good that Google can’t compress them any further. Meaning that, if you use Google photos on an Apple device, even if you pick the free option which supposedly compresses your photos, you’re essentially getting unlimited full-sized storage, because they can’t! The irony is that Google’s own Pixel phone, which used to come with unlimited storage as a perk, no longer does so, and users of Google’s own flagship phone have to pay for more storage if they want full-res files stored, yet Apple “the archenemy”, gets a free ride on Google’s service. Whodathunk.
Ok, let’s bring this book to a close. Lest I sound like I work for Google or something: if you want no part with Google or the cloud, or with them going through your pics, there are other options that are not exactly as good but are getting better. You can set up a NAS from Synology or QNap and both of these brands now offer models that have photo identification algorithms which can find an impressive number of items and faces throughout your photos. From what I’ve seen Qnap’s is a bit more detailed though. For example, where Synology will impressively identify photos with “Chinese Food”, QNap will go one step further and also find “Lo Mein”.
TLDR; if you’re ok with letting Google go through your photos, just upload them all to their Photos service. They probably de-duplicate on their servers, but who cares, you get unlimited space. Their AI is so good you can find anything far beyond what you would have bothered to tag. Don’t like Google and/or the cloud? Synology and QNap have NAS models that can do the photo-identifying thing and eliminate the need to tag. Doing paid work? Lightroom FTW.
HTH!
I’ve been doing the same thing with photos from my camera, various phones and those scanned. This quarantine thing gave me more time for it.
Basically, I had dozens of files I had labeled pics, pictures, misc pics etc…
On my laptop with Windows, I came up with a dozen main files to work with (vacations, kids, pets, scenery, inventory etc…).
I grab a pic & move it to a file, not spending much time with it. There’s a few pics I dropped into two areas, but mainly there are way over 50% dupes that won’t transfer unless I want it to.
That part is done, now I go into each file and add and label sub-files. I repeat the process, labeling many of the pics takes the most time. The phone pics have the date on them, which helps.
What worries me is the large fireproof hard drive I have that has thousands more pics.
Haven’t figured the searching thing yet, but finding the right file has been easy so far.
I haven’t used it, but shotwell might be a choice. It was created for a certain linux desktop environment and has been ported to Windows.
https://shotwell.en.softonic.com/
or read https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2326787
This looked interesting. Seems like a fit for the semi-pro digital photographer too.
https://www.diffractor.com/
Here is a intro video to see if it might be a fit.
i use google photos but don’t really worry about organizing them. you can set the photo date, location, and add a description pretty easily. that gets you organization by date and location automatically, and the description is indexed for searching.
i also pay $2/mo for extra storage
that said, i do need to find a way to back them all up regularly to a not-google place.
There’s a ton of great options presented so far, so I’ll keep this short.
If you’re looking for another photo organizer w/ tagging, facial recognition, and plugins to export to lots of places & things, look at Digikam.
It’s free & open-source, and does a great job. I used to use it when I was more serious about my photo collection.
The other thing is, have a backup.
The easiest way to do this is use Backblaze - it’s a set it and forget it backup for your whole computer ($6/month).
Totally recommend Backblaze When my external backup drive failed I still had a copy on Backblaze and could restore everything!