Thread: Helping sort through images

I have a library of ~200,000 digital photos that I know about.
Many of these are the individual images that make up panoramic photos which could be up to 2 dozen or more images per panorama.

Most of the photos have been taken with digital cameras and phones since 1998.
I have a few thousand scanned photos mainly of family, dated back to the early 1900's.
Most of my family photos taken by my relatives had the dates written on the backs, if not I could usually work out one way or other the approximate year.
I also have a few thousand images that originate out of powerpoint or other programs with a drawing program.

Scanned Photos or those generated before 2006 are stored on 2 identical sets of 27 DVDs - one set is kept at home the other at my son's place.
Now that big HDs are cheap, at some stage I will locate these on the same backup HDs as described below - this should be a straight copy because they are classified in the same way as those on the HDs

Photos taken since ~2006 are stored on 3 HD's, as 3 more or less identical sets of images
My laptop and 2 backup HDs each have the same set of photos.
One of the backup HDs is alternately used to back up the laptop every day, and that backup HD is swapped with another located at my son's place every few months.

During this time I have
- lost one backup HD (easily backed up from my laptop and HD replaced)
- my laptop HD had to be wiped (HD was OK but severely corrupted when I spilt coffee onto the keyboard - easily backed up from one of the Backup HDs).
In 2012 I accidentally deleted about 3 months worth of images from my laptop HD and then of course before I realised it the backup did the same thing and unfortunately none of these were on second (off site) backup. I was able to recover some images from my mobile phone and some from the SD card in my camera but now I am much more careful about deleting any images.

All images are stored in similar directories by
Year, then Broad Topic (travel, craft, family, etc) and the inside the Broad Topics under specific topics.
eg 1999, Travel, Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie.
The subset of images that get posted on the Web in forums or FB or sent by email etc are processed in Photoshop and then stored in a parallel set of directories in the same year.

There are some mixups/duplicates/gaps but most importantly I am generally able to find just about any image I think I have taken fairly quickly.
My memory is very good for dates so I can make the first filter pass easily but it does get a bit harder after that.

I started doing this in 1999 and f I was to try and do this now I would find it overwhelming, so I am glad I started it early.

I store by year
eg
yesterdays photos will be downloaded to hdd in PC called Photos etc
directory "canon DSLR
sub directory "2016
folder "2016-11-14 Tom's last post

last saturday's photos similarly stored but folder
2016-11-12 hurdles etc

these are regularly backed up to a double raid system
I know I should also have storage off site (even a hdd in the shed would work)

any editing I save the edited image to the same folder - keeping the original unaltered - I keep the camera number as part of the saved name in case I want to go back to the original (it might mean that I have eleven or twelve '_3658.jpg' but the year is easily able to be located or worked out. I recently went back through my photos to locate photos of a young lad who started playing hockey with my lad about 9 years ago

any I need printed I simply copy to other media and get printed (or my wife does)

No matter what your system is, I think its all to do with discipline!
I have about 10-15,000 colour slides dating back to 1970. I started cataloging them but soon got lazy and so the majority is stored in boxes. "One day" I have to go through them.
With the digital pics, so far I have labelled them and stored in appropriate files and folders on the computer which is soooo easy to locate and view. My daughter is an IT Techy and has installed a"Nazz" to store everything that our 3 computers have backed up. The Nazz stores stuff in duplicate, theory being if one side crashes the other side has the info. Its all over my head. At the end of each day the Nazz picks up stored stuff from the computers then enters it into the duplicate HD. Well I think thats how it is done.

I am finding when I down load off the cameras then go to appropriate place to store them I may even do a document and use the pics to illustrate the subject. This is handy for a future How-to if needed. But it all comes back to DOING IT every time before the content gets out of hand.

I have about 140,000 images which includes some slide and photo scans. I also includes a good chunk of my partners photos too. I use a system similar to Nicks. Store by year, and in each year store days photos with the folder name;
Year_Month_DayTopicOrPlace.
If you do it that way an alphabetic listing on the folders (which all computers do as a default) will give you a chronologic listing.
Occasionally I will have another set of subfolders within the year folder. For instance on a trip somewhere over a few days I might group in a subfolder but still do those days as Year_Month_DayTopicOrPlace.

files.png

Sadly I have to do it all manually as I haven't set myself up to do it automatically (though I should). Every now and then I buy another external hard drive and do a big back up. So I end up with a lot of drives spread around the house (including one in a fire proof safe).
Start sooner rather than later. After some insistence from me, my partner just spent the last day and a half sorting through all her memory cards and sticks from only about the last 2 years, to back them up to a couple of external drives.

SWK

PS The Lord Howe example above; usually on holidays I take a lap top and external drive and the partner takes an external drive too. At the end of each day or so, back up all photos from everyones cameras to each external drive (and also leave them on the laptop if there is space) so there are two (or three) copies of all photos in separate luggage. Then you don't have to do any further sorting if you don't want to. Just copy the lot to your long term storage.

I don't have time to read this post thoroughly, but if your question is how to sort though a heap of photos and find the duplicates then there are a few photo duplicate finders on the market. Try this one:

Duplicate Photo Finder - Find Duplicate and Similar Photos

Apparently even finds duplicates among resized pictures, edited images, different formats etc.

When I moved all my pics from CD's and DVD's to all on harddrive storage a couple of years ago I used VisiPics to find duplicates. The pics don't have to be exactly the same to find matches, differences in resolution, image format etc can be taken into account.

Thanks all .... sorry other priorities have got in the way as per usual. Whilst I really should file the images better for searching my priority at the moment is searching for the duplicates. I will have a closer look at the recommendations for programs that can do this.

Cheers

Stinky

Hi Stinky

as others have advised, the key is a system and discipline.
last count I had over 80,000 digital images, not counting duplicates.

typically they're stored by
high level topic, e.g. short breaks, Woodworking, etc.
then 2nd level topic, e.g. Kiama May 2009, Kiama Wood Show
then 3rd level topic, e.g. Blow Hole, or the date taken, or the camera used --- useful when 2 or 3 cameras may be on the go at the same location.

the system is flexible as I can add additional topics -- e.g. "sized for email" -- as required.

Originally Posted by Arron

if your question is how to sort though a heap of photos and find the duplicates then there are a few photo duplicate finders on the market. Try this one:

Duplicate Photo Finder - Find Duplicate and Similar Photos

Apparently even finds duplicates among resized pictures, edited images, different formats etc.

Originally Posted by Fuzzie

When I moved all my pics from CD's and DVD's to all on hard drive storage a couple of years ago I used VisiPics to find duplicates. The pics don't have to be exactly the same to find matches, differences in resolution, image format etc can be taken into account.

thanks for these recomendations

Visipics much faster than Duplicate Photo Finder.

Hi Stinky,
I came across this section on image management while doinr some research on HDR. I hope it is of use to you.

Image Management