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As per title really! I've a lot of images (dating back to 1990) so as you can probably guess there is a lot (over 25gig worth) So to make my life easier is there any kind of software that could help sort them into folders with dates and such, also would said software be able to get rid of duplicates, or find them? i know there is the odd few but with so many pictures of my kids.....well its hard to troll through!
Cheers chaps :)
Paint Shop Pro (£70) and Photoshop elements (£80) both have cataloging/database style tools, you might also want to look at Adobe Lightroom.
For £85'ish you can get a Bamboo Pen & Touch Fun tablet that comes with a serial code for Photoshop Elements included.
Why not windows live photo gallery, will do all that and also if you train the face detection feature I've found it works quite well. Means you can sort and index your photos by person too.
For duplicates, I like Auslogics one, it's also free. http://www.auslogics.com/en/software...e-file-finder/
You could leave the files as they are and use Picasa as a 'album' since it sorts its view into dates. http://picasa.google.com/
But if you wish, the sorting may be done by this, http://www.mjbpix.com/ (Link to Photo Move on the right)
Alternatively, you could dump all the photos into a big folder (search using *.jpg or whichever format you use), switch to Detailed view and sort by date (you may have to edit the bar to bring the relevant column into view) then manually move to folders. But with 25GB worth, it is going to be time consuming.
So, i tried out windows live photo gallery and to be honest i don't think that much of it, yes it can batch to dates but that is no good if i can transfer them into folders, in a folder with separate people or in this case, animals o.O that or im doing something wrong!
To add, dating the folders/images is not as important to me as moving for arguments sake a picture of one of my girls to a folder named after her, i cant seem to find the option to do this in any of the programs i've tried so far :(
So to wrap up i want to move each person to their own folder, then from inside of the folder i will sort the pictures via dates inside of the folder :)
Ah, I think this is the problem with windows live photo gallery. They haven't explained what they are doing.
The idea is basically all your photos live in one 'folder'. The problem is folders aren't what you want. What you want are 'Views'.
A folder has a 1 to 1 mapping. That is one file can only exist in one folder at a time (unless you take a copy, which is bad).
A View on the other hand has some Filter, say Pictures of My Cat from Aug11 to Dec12. It can behave like a folder in a way too.
If you want, you can then Copy the result of a View to a folder, say to put it on the web or similar. Use the filters to get the view you want, ctrl + a, ctrl + c, paste wherever.
The version of Elements is three versions out of date, at v8 though, compared to the current v11.Quote:
Originally Posted by KeyboardDemon
For the specific need, that might be enough, of course, but it's worth bearing in mind.
Cameraworld were (might still be) doing Elements (v11) at about £50, a few weeks ago, and Lightroom at a similar price for about the same, though that was v3 just prior to the v4 launch. I didn't quite get to the bottom of it, but they appeared to NOT qualify for upgrades, so I assumed they were unbundled OEM packaged versions.
Lightroom does, of course, excel at organisation but it's only a small part of Lightroom's capabilities, so unless you need/want the editing functions, it might be overkill.
Personally, I still use Extensis Portfolio, but mainly because I've been using it for, oh 'eck, about 15 years I guess, and switching to lightroom would be a massive job. That certainly would be overkill here.
I seem to remember that the version of ACD's 'viewer' software, ACDSee, had some organising/cataloging capability, though that wasn't what I used it for, and it was a long time ago. Great software, though, so it might be worth checking out.
It's worth thinking about exactly what you're looking to do, though, razer. Animus hit on with the "mapping" points.
At the basic level, you can "organise" photos by constructing a thought-out directory tree structure by, for example, year, then location, subject, etc. But, as image volumes grow, that can quickly get, first, unweildy and out of hand, and second, inadequate for finding what you want.
The more sophisticated approach is a simpler storage structure, but a database sitting over it, so you xan use automatically fenerated data in file metadata, be it date, aperture used, etc, or geo-data if your camera has GPS (mine does, or rather, some do), ir if you add it manually, but also keywords, such as location (added by you), peopkes names, image subject (Mary's wedding, sunset over Pacific, macro spider redback, MotoGP Rossi, or whatever).
That latter method, with cataloging software is hugely powerful BUT .... there are a couple of gotchas.
Gotcha 1) Like backups, you have to keep doing it for it to be useful. Once you start down the satabase route, it's ENTIRELY dependent on you keeping on top of it, and adding images to the database, AND adding the keywords, etc. If you get behind, and find yourself facing adding and tagging 2000 (or 20,000) images, it's daunting. ;)
Gotcha 2). Get the decision about what to use right, because once you've got a large, catalogued and databased image library, switching product and re-cataloging the whole damn thing is a nightmare.