Filing, sorting backing up photos.

[Soapy Sam]

I have a 250GB USB drive, partitioned in roughly 60GB chunks.
There are about 25,000 photos (mainly JPGs) on the drive, of which there may be up to 3 duplicate copies of some. (I suspect there are only about 7000 actual individual images).

Some have been labelled and sorted in a half-assed fashion.

Project:- To sort, properly label and efficiently back up one copy of every file, while deleting accidental copies.
Much of this must be done manually, as I aim to delete sub standard and worthless images, but I'd like to get rid of all the duplicates first.

Can anyone suggest an efficient way to go about this, or an (ideally free) software package which will magically do it for me?

[scribble]

Can anyone suggest an efficient way to go about this, or an (ideally free) software package which will magically do it for me?

I wrote a perl script to compare md5s on large sets of files, and delete duplicates. I'd be glad to post it here; it's very simple. I use it to delete duplicates in my porn collection. If your duplicate files are exact duplicates (and not, say, the same picture at different resolutions or something) then this'll get 'em.

Standard disclaimers apply... I'm not responsible if this destroys everything you own, etc.

renamed to .txt for ease of attachment.

[Smike]

Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/) would probably help with the sorting. It's a sort of software photo album.

[Soapy Sam]

I have Picasa. I find it confuses more than it clarifies.

I think I'll have a go at scripting. Scribble - I take it that's a PERL script aimed at a Linux system? I'm dealing with jpgs on a Windows NTFL drive. While I'm (slightly) familiar with VBScript, I never saw PERL at all.
I think some variant on this will be the way to go though.

It seems daft to do it manually when the PC is actually able to do it itself.

[Starthinker]

What I really need is a program that will look at each picture, recognize the people and places and events and such, then sort them and rename them with descriptive names and then invite other programs to come over and look at them for me.

Actually I had the same problem with roughly the same number of pictures but spread over 5-6 different computers which were all backed up to each other and the same pic resized for my web page and all that so I ended up with all kinds of duplicates spread all over. Then when they were all sorted and on one hard drive I backed up to another hard drive, made different changes to each collection, recreated web pages, resized some for different reasons and now the process is starting all over again. The worse is when you think you got it sorted out and backed up so you delete a folder only to find it wasn't backed up yet or it was a folder with the same name but with different pictures. Arrgghh.

[aerosolben]

http://www.keronsoft.com/dupdetector.html

I've been using this for a while for duplicates. It has adjustable sensitivity for image comparison - set it at 99%-100% to find all exact duplicates, and lower it a couple percentage points to find altered versions of the same pictures. No real cons to list - it does what it does very well.

Oh, and its free.

[Soapy Sam]

What I really need is a program that will look at each picture, recognize the people and places and events and such, then sort them and rename them with descriptive names and then invite other programs to come over and look at them for me.



That's EXACTLY what I'm looking for! Freeware, of course.
(Programmers- do I smell a market niche..?)

http://www.keronsoft.com/dupdetector.html

I've been using this for a while for duplicates. It has adjustable sensitivity for image comparison - set it at 99%-100% to find all exact duplicates, and lower it a couple percentage points to find altered versions of the same pictures. No real cons to list - it does what it does very well.

Oh, and its free.

Alhamdullillah! I'll go take a look at that.

Smike-
I reloaded the newest version of Picasa, which has indeed helped with the sorting. My previous install of Picasa2 always seemed a bit ropy compared to P1. I must have been missing something when I installed it.

Thanks, everybody.:)