Help Me Sort my Photo's

JoeySully

Hi - i have 8 yeas of photos on my computer stored over 4 disks. i would like to sort them into ojne location. i'm haveing trouble doin this. i first tried searching for all photos on alldiske and then moving them to a new folder but this was extremely slow. itried with google's picasso but this doesnt seem to copy them to one location just leaves them where they are. so my queston is - is there any application that will search my compter for all photos and the help me soort them into folders in one location??

haz

JoeySully wrote: »

is there any application that will search my compter for all photos and the help me soort them into folders in one location??

Sorry if it sounds obvious, but Windows Explorer or the file browser in whatever operating system you use is probably best. I would take the following steps:

1. If you can then make a backup of every vital picture on a different disk (or CDs / DVDs) than the ones you are altering. Use check disk with the "fix file system" option, which requires a reboot, and then defragment the drive you want to put the pictures on.

2. Organise a set of empty folders to receive the files. Name them by year, subject, the camera model or whatever works to trigger your memory when searching. Keep the number of images in each folder low, like less than 200 if that represents a typical event / holiday / photoshoot.

3. In Explorer you can right-click on the drive name (e.g. d:\) and search for a comma-separated listed of image types like "*.jpg, *.jpeg, *.raw, *.nef" to locate all the picture folders and picture files.

4. Open two copies of Explorer and resize them to fill the left and right half of the screen. Click and drag either folders or files into the pre-prepared receiving folders. You could also drag identified pictures from the Search dialogue. Press Shift-Click and drag if you want to MOVE the folders or files - but copying, checking and then deleting the originals is safer.

5. Check you have all the files you need before you clean up. Right-click and select Properties to get a count of the number of folders, files and bytes in a pair of directories. There are two byte-counts, the first being the bytes of data (i.e. actual image files) and ignore the second byte-count which is bytes of disk storage according to cluster size, fragmentation, etc.

6. You did make a backup of vital files first in case you delete everything by accident, the disk head crashes during the transfer or there is a power-cut?

7. Winmerge http://winmerge.org/ is an excellent free tool for comparing two folder structures and all the files within them, then moving files from one to the other. You might want to switch off binary comparison so that files are labelled "identical" if they have the same name, date and size (which is very fast) but without waiting for the contents to be compared (which can take hours).

Cabaal

Think manual work is the best you can do, then arrange via YEAR > MONTH > DAY OR SUBJECT within that month