Recommend photo management software

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Lizard1977

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#207745 12-Jan-2017 09:22

I'm embarking on a file tidying project and one of the biggest messes to clean up are my photos. They are currently scattered over many drives and locations. What I want to do is bring them together into a single location (my NAS) and then set a regular backup.

I've identified a number of issues that I need to solve. First, how to structure the folders. Having dabbled with subject-based folders, this is a time-consuming and labour intensive approach that I just don't have time for anymore. I think it would be best to have all the photos sorted into folders based on the date they were taken. But I'd rather not do this manually. What I want is to automatically create date-based folders and move the files to the new folders based on the date they were taken.

A second issue is finding the photos later. I think the best approach is to use tags - names of people, places, events, etc - that can then be searched. It would be best to have these tags written into the file's property sheet so that it is accessible to Windows and other programs (meaning it's not tied to the initial program setting the tags).

A third issue is duplicates. There is a high chance that I have created copies over the years, and it would be good to ensure that we have only one copy of the photo in the master location. So I also need the ability to search for duplicates (based on file name or property data).

I've experimented with Picasa in the past but it has always felt a bit clunky to me, and I seem to recall that it's being discontinued in favour of Google Photos (though I can't find a desktop version of Google Photos, and I want to manage my photos locally rather than in the cloud). Does anyone know of a program that does these three things really well? I'm not above paying for it if the software works really well.

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#1701832 12-Jan-2017 09:56

I use folders for year, month, then event or date. I have the last folder the event name. I look at them with Bridge. That's all the organisation I do, I don't tag people, I don't run software to manage it. I rarely look at old photos so it's not needed.

Many people like Lightroom. I hate it for photo processing. I use Adobe Bridge, but it's not photo management, it's RAW processing and such.

shk292

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#1701865 12-Jan-2017 10:06

I was going to recommend Picasa until your past para. True that it is no longer supported, but it is still available and it still works. It would certainly automate the process of sorting all photos into folder by date taken, provided the metadata is correct.

I still use Picasa and haven't found a suitable alternative, so I'll watch this thread with interest

Lizard1977

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#1701874 12-Jan-2017 10:12

While waiting for replies I decided to have another scrounge around the internet, and found a small little tool called ExifSort. It does the first thing I need, very simply. It takes an input folder, and then copies all files to an output folder based on the date taken. I'm giving it a go now and it seems to do it pretty well. I'm thinking this will help me start sorting through the mass of photos.

One thing this won't handle correctly is scans of old photos. Looking through the output folder there are some obvious examples (e.g. folder dated 1877-01-01), but there are some others which are recent dates but where the EXIF data is obviously incorrect. That could be a bit tricky...

bluedisk

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#1701940 12-Jan-2017 11:08

This is an interesting topic as it seems to be way harder than it should be to sort, organise and relabel hordes of old photos, and for it to be a long term solution.

I used to like Picasa till they stopped supporting it and I have since moved platforms from Win to Apple. I find Adobes software (Lightroom, Bridge etc) gets over complicated very quickly and wants to import files all the time. I also dont like using the cloud for photos, theres way too many and I mainly see disadvantages (yearly rental, reliance on internet access).

I find Google face recognition way better than Adobes, which makes grouping photos quicker.

Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all...

blakamin

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#1701974 12-Jan-2017 11:45

I store mine on an external drive and point Google photos to it. It syncs them every time I add a new photo.

I pay for google storage and upload full size. Google photos makes finding what I want really easy. Search is really easy... Dates, key words, anything.

rb99

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#1701994 12-Jan-2017 12:31

http://www.truorganizer.com/

The blurb sounds good. Never used it though.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

rb99

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#1701997 12-Jan-2017 12:39

I use the built in 'Photos' app provided with Windows 10. I can't see any issues with it so far and the automatic OneDrive syncing is pretty handy for back up. Automatically sorts your images by month/year which is all I really need.

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Dynamike

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#1702072 12-Jan-2017 14:18

I've used ACDSee for the past 10 years and find it really good, but it costs around $60.
http://www.acdsee.com/en/products/acdsee

CutCutCut

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#1702095 12-Jan-2017 14:58

Hmmm, interesting to see where this thread goes. I too am on the lookout to eventually replace picasa. I was thinking about giving lightroom a go, which might also make sense with playing with the RAW of my RX100 (which I haven't yet tried in RAW). I've always managed my photos by year then month, and possibly something else for a special event. A few random folders which i need to tidy up. I'm trying to do the same with video, to keep things in order for the future.

WyleECoyoteNZ

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#1702122 12-Jan-2017 15:23

I've used Faststone for years. Works really well, as a viewer, can batch rename, resize.

Deals with RAW files as well.

MaxLV

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#1702342 13-Jan-2017 00:42

WyleECoyoteNZ:

I've used Faststone for years. Works really well, as a viewer, can batch rename, resize.

Deals with RAW files as well.

Me too...

my Faststone catalog stats:

332 GB

1,342 Folders

80,143 image files.

From 1999 to current date.

Catalog folders are named:

Year -------->

Month ------>

Date -------> image files (named as date taken -#### (ie 2017-01-12-0005) are stored in their correct folders.

I use Faststone to download the image files from my cameras either by USB cable or from the SD card in a card reader.

As part of the download process it creates a folder for each day and places the files in their correct folders, and renames each file from the camera file name to the date file name (as above)

It's free (donation ware)

It's a good exif editor as well. For three months in 2015, I had forgotten to reset my camera's time for daylight saving. once I realised this I simply batch processed all the files in Faststone to change the time the photos were taken by 1 hour to the correct time.

SepticSceptic

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#1704533 17-Jan-2017 10:10

Is there a way to bulk edit the EXIF details ? Or select a number of images and just edit a portion of the EXIF data ?

I have been scanning all past photos, going back 50 years, including my photos my parents had taken. Thankfully I had access to a Kodak bulk scanner, otherwise I'd have baulked at such a project using a standard desktop scanner.

Slides next

quite nice seeing my parents in their younger carefree days, and grandparents looking all prim and proper

UHD

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#1704539 17-Jan-2017 10:26

I'm curious as to the seemingly common desire for file re-naming. What is the advantage/need of re-naming the files? Surely it is less work/management to have them automatically sorted into folders by your management software and use the software to find what you are after. I feel like good quality abstraction from the file names is a huge advantage over software that can re-name the file to keep some sort of filesystem 'order'.

For reference, I have some 220GiB of backed up images spanning just over a decade arranged into folders named YYYY-MM-DD. The files are all randomly named (whatever the various cameras decided they preferred) but since they all have EXIF data which includes the date and time they were taken management is not an issue at all and I can find anything I need in a couple of clicks.

Hammerer

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#1704563 17-Jan-2017 10:57

I create folders for each year and have subfolders for each date (yyymmdd) and event/location. Then I use whatever photo software I like because my file organisation is independent.

I had committed to Picasa and completed the facial recognition for all my photos and the location data for many. This took weeks of work which is now wasted because Google Photos is not a complete replacement for Picasa. That's why I refuse to commit to Google for anything because this is the third time I've been orphaned by Google when they phase out products and don't provide a complete migration path or don't have a replacement product.

Picasa was very good for keeping photos in folders with dates in the folder name: you could review an import folder and copy groups of related photos to a new folder. Last time I looked, Google Photos still dumped the photos into one big bin with no means to search by date. Plus Picasa facial recognition data does not transfer.

Lizard1977

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#1704580 17-Jan-2017 11:21

UHD:

I'm curious as to the seemingly common desire for file re-naming. What is the advantage/need of re-naming the files? Surely it is less work/management to have them automatically sorted into folders by your management software and use the software to find what you are after. I feel like good quality abstraction from the file names is a huge advantage over software that can re-name the file to keep some sort of filesystem 'order'.

For reference, I have some 220GiB of backed up images spanning just over a decade arranged into folders named YYYY-MM-DD. The files are all randomly named (whatever the various cameras decided they preferred) but since they all have EXIF data which includes the date and time they were taken management is not an issue at all and I can find anything I need in a couple of clicks.

When I started my file renaming project many years ago, I wasn't aware of a (free) software option to tag/identify the content of the images. I file searching within Windows was pretty good though, and searching on keywords as part of the filename produced good results. It also was a way of guaranteeing that the information would stay with the file. A few programs I experimented with that let me tag photos didn't write the metadata to the photo, so it was contingent on me using that program indefinitely.

However, it's one thing to do that for a few folders of photos, it's another to do it for 10s or 100s of gigabytes of photos. I wouldn't do it now, but back then (pre-iPhone) I didn't anticipate the volume of photos I would be generating.

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