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I have a directory full of a massive number of digital photos on my laptop. It has been copied and re-copied a number of times and occasionally duplicate copies have been made. I have procrastinated about writing a tool to scan the directories and sanitize them:

  • Sort them into chronological directories.
  • Mark exact duplicates for deletion.
  • Rename files based on date.

Does something like this exist? What do you use to manage thousands of digital photos?

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6 Answers

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For Windows I would use Picasa from Google, on Linux I would say F-Spot. For Mac OS X I would guess iPhoto is good.

There also alternatives like Aperture and Lightroom, although they are bit more pricey.

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Picasa is great for casual image management, especially since there's a nice plugin for uploading pictures to facebook and the app ties in really well with the Picasa web. Lightroom is more for amateur and professional photographers who like to pamper their photos a bit before saving them, also great for importing RAWs, light-adjusting them and exporting them to a smaller format like jpg. – Stefan Thyberg Jul 15 '09 at 8:39
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+1 for Picasa. Very accessible editing tools – BenA Jul 15 '09 at 8:41
I wonder if Picasa will do the remove duplicates thing ? – RedBlueThing Jul 15 '09 at 11:04
There is an experimental tool for finding duplicates in Picasa, under Experimental > Tools > Show Duplicate Files. Since it's experimental, be careful when using it. – Peter Thorin Jul 16 '09 at 9:19
I like Picasa too; but I use it to avoid managing my photos, since it just looks for them everywhere and shows them in some semblance of chronological order. Kind of the opposite to the actual questioner's requirements. – Joel in Gö Aug 13 '09 at 7:36
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up vote 2 down vote

I know you are looking for an all-in-one solution but for the renaming part you can check out jhead (source available and pre-built binaries for Mac, Windows, and Linux (Ubuntu)); you can use whatever rules you want to rename the file including the date/time stored in the Exif info. I used to do this for all of my photos; in the last two years or so I've just been leaving the default name from the camera.

From the site:

Example: jhead -n%Y%m%d-%H%M%S *.jpg

This will rename files matched by *.jpg according to YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS

Note to Windows batch file users: '%' is used to deliminate macros in Windows batch files. You must use %% to get one % passed to the program. So from a batch file, you would have to write "jhead -n%%Y%%m%%d-%%H%%M%%S *.jpg"

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I've also used jhead to alter timestamps... My friend and I went to Vegas and the time on one of our cameras was off 3 hours and 24 minutes. We just happened to both take a picture at the same time, so we just reference the time difference in the 2 pix. Once I knew the exact difference, I adjusted all the picture times for one camera and now the pitures were in sync. – Roy Rico Oct 2 '09 at 21:10
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I use Flickr. For $25USD a year you can upload unlimited amount of photos. Its collections, sets, and tagging abilities work great. The photos can be made public or private depending on what type of person you are. Another good thing is that you now have an online backup. The files are stored at their full qualities.

The only downside is that to retrieve all the images for download is a pain. As far as I know you can only download one image at a time off Flickr.

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Flickr doesn't really help me with my existing disorganization. I also have a bit of a problem with FLickr employees reviewing my stuff. I do tend to be a little paranoid ;). – RedBlueThing Jul 15 '09 at 11:07
Flickr is great but it doesn't allow/facilitate managing metadata (tagging, descriptions, etc) on your PC, just on their website. – Jason S Jul 15 '09 at 13:59
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I would imagine Photo Mechanic will do what you're looking for, and fast. If it doesn't, it can be easily scripted to do so. It isn't cheap ($150) but it's worth it if you would use some of the other features (IPTC, fast RAW viewing, flagging and batch processing).

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This looks cool. Checking it out. – RedBlueThing Jul 15 '09 at 11:05
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up vote 1 down vote

Check out iMatch. I used it for several years, and the only reason I stopped is that I have a complex database that I associate w/ my photos so I bailed for my own custom solution.

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I like the fact that Picasa directly uploads it to my online Picasa account, makes it easier to share them. Though probably most progams would be able to do this, I like the elegance that I don't really have to do much to get it working

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