I’m not very good at organising my photos. I mainly dump them on a hard drive when I get home.
I have eventually got round to organising the 4 ssd in my pc. It’s taken my quite a long time and been very frustrating, but it is done at last. Now I need to do the same with my photos, I keep them all on external HDD.
On each HDD there are multiple folders, and in each folder there are multiple folders, and in each one of those folders…yip you guessed it!!! It is going to be an absolute nightmare, but I know it needs done. I’ve already used auslogics duplicate file finder to delete over 200Gb of duplicates on one 500Gb drive, I’m really hoping it is as good as everyone says it is and I’ve not lost anything. I have about ten drives to go through, varying in size from 80Gb to 500Gb.
So my question is, is there software out there that can help with a bit of automation?
Duplicates, try AllDup. You can delete the duplicates if you want but it also has a move option which creates timed folders, one per run, and keeps the original folder structures below so restoring is only a copy.
Tidying photos, something I’ve been meaning to do myself with all my phone photos so I took a look. Found PhotoMove, free & paid version. Trying the free version, uses Exif data to move or copy files into dated structures. Took me a few minutes to install, select folders and copy the files.
For an exif date of today, the free version puts the file in 2023/2023_08/2023_08_12 below a folder of your choosing. It’s only $8.99 for the paid version with additional options. That’s the date format I’ve always used, impressed so I’ll be paying for more options.
I see you’re asking for PC, however I’m answering this for the Apple MacOS crowd in case they stumble upon your thread: Apple’s Photos app is good for this.
Power up and plug in drone (or remove SD card and use a reader). Import is handled by the Photos App.
You can store photos and videos within the Photos library (which I do), or have them stored externally (called referenced files). You can get your original files back out by doing export unmodified original.
It’s got fairly automatic organisation built in. Times and locations. Cataloguing, events, places, subjects, (and faces if you have any in your photos or videos) are all catered for you.
I think it flags duplicates, and won’t by default import a photo or a video if it’s already in the library (you can force its hand if you want to). It can erase the card contents by I don’t do this until there’s a backup.
It handles having JPEG and RAW versions or the same image and you can choose which you use. You can edit photos. I don’t edit videos there, I use Apples’s iMovie app. You can create your own folders, albums and smart albums, tag photos and videos, do searches.and do impromptu searches.
Further it’s supported by Apple’s Time Machine (backup that’s built in to MacOS) which is good for doing backups and restores.
My apologies for sounding like an Apple shill.
Not sure if it fits what you’re after (or your budget) but Adobe Lightroom is really good for organising photos. It can assign them to folders (e.g. by month) automatically on import, for example. You can also organise them in multiple “collections”, which don’t rely on the on-disk folder structure. And you can have things automatically assigned to collections based on meta data like location, subject, etc.
I have recently installed PhotoPrism on a Raspberry Pi 4 (64bit) via Docker, its early days yet and I’m still getting to grips with the functionality but it does order everything by date, places etc.
Screen shot of my install on my PC browser…
Looks nice. I found a demo here …
This work for me may not work for you…
EXIF on photos is your friend as well as extracting on filename_format, e.g most phone have 2023081221300. I have a few script that extracts the data and spits into the a date based filestructure
I tend not to worry too much on duplicates, I use a backup (Attic) which has Deduplicating so for expensive off-site it is reduced (rsync.net but even then very cheap). Hard disk space is not worth the effort to manually trawl the photos.
Stick a good frontend and your good to go. Tips: pick a front end that keep the photos/videos Un-touched
(Bragging writes 23 years of photos, 27,000 files stored, not much video so only 82G)
I have Lightroom!!! Time to go do some more reading, thanks
I created a folder called DJIDays, then for every day I’m filming with either the drone or the Osmo Pocket, I dump both stills and videos into a subfolder labelled YYYYMMDDLocation. So today after filming at Rawcliffe Lake in York, I created the folder: 20230813RaecliffeLake. If I decide to do a post-production edit to boil them down into a single story, I put the result of that into a folder called DJIFinished. As I don’t always do post-editing immediately (if even at all), I know what folder to go back to. Today was more about flying practice, so the video results are for my education, not for public display. All these get copied onto three different backup devices of course, just in case.