Picture organization advice, please

[Marthe48]

Good morning.

I have 2 external hard drives and mainly store photos on them. There are a lot of duplicates. I'd like to delete the duplicates, hopefully without losing all copies of any photo. I looked at ideas before I posting. Several choices. Does anyone have a favorite app for organizing pictures? Our photo library goes back to about 2012, and we haven't organized it, just added to the confusion. I appreciate any advice. Thanks!

[Tetrachloride]

1. my advice starts elsewhere

1. get a third hard drive.
2. backup one of the drives
3. proceed slowly

i lost a lot of photos either due to software or fatigue

[Marthe48]

2. Thanks!

My whole system needs to be updated. I've been putting it off, but it is tiresome to keep using what I have.

[usonian]

3. A request to you and other advice seekers. Please tell us more. Which operating system?

There are apps that seek out duplicates, but they are almost always platform-specific.

[Marthe48]

4. I've got a Dell Latitude

Windows 10 Pro, 466G storage. I think I bought it in 2021 and it's never been my favorite device.

The older Ext. HD is a WD (Passport) with 149 G storage, FAT32 file system.

The newer one is Iomega, with 930G storage, NTFS file system.

Both are over 10 years old.

[usonian]

6. Thanks for the info.

As you request, it is absolutely best to get real feedback from users rather than just reviews!

I found the following free apps that run on windows, but I totally would dry-run on some spare directories first to see if anything goes wrong.

https://www.duplicate-finder.com/photo.html

Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is a free powerful tool, that helps you to find and remove duplicate photos on your computer. With this app you can easily clean up your photo collection from duplicates or even similar images.

WIndows only.

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https://dupeguru.voltaicideas.net/

dupeGuru is a cross-platform (Linux, OS X, Windows) GUI tool to find duplicate files in a system.

dupeGuru is a tool to find duplicate files on your computer. It can scan either filenames or contents.

dupeGuru is safe. Its engine has been especially designed with safety in mind. Its reference directory system as well as its grouping system prevent you from deleting files you didn’t mean to delete.

Do whatever you want with your duplicates. Not only can you delete duplicates files dupeGuru finds, but you can also move or copy them elsewhere. There are also multiple ways to filter and sort your results to easily weed out false duplicates (for low threshold scans).

some instructions here:
https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/dupeguru-guide

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AS ALWAYS, test on some waste folders first.
I looked for actual user/reader feedback on these, but nothing right away popped up

FWIW, the DuckDuckGo search engine got Rickrolled.
The internet is weird.



P.S. Those are very old drives, magnetic, for sure.
I would upgrade drives.
So, get a new drive and copy over files you want.

A 2TB drive would do. Keep the old ones "just in case"

[Marthe48]

7. I bookmarked this thread

Exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks!


I got caught up looking at pictures. I think digital images is the greatest gift of the computer age. We took so many pictures we wouldn't have if we were relying on a camera and a roll of film.

[usonian]

9. I hope something works out well for you.

I took loads of slides starting about 1970, and since I got a 45 megapixel cam, haven't digitized them, only a few.

I think that this will give me about all I can get out of the slides, compared to a real expensive scanner.

But since I went digital, of course, thousands upon thousands of images on disk. It wasn't until I got a Coolpix P510 quite a few years back, that the collection exploded. It has an effective focal length or 24-1000 mm. and does fabulously well with macro close-ups, just not extreme ones. I am an optics nut (did optical engineering for years) and used nothing but that camera for over 10 years, and skipped the DSLR era entirely. It still delivers, and is now my "take it everywhere in the car" camera. It used to feel BIG, but since the mirrorless cameras, feels small.

I, too, have semi-organized photos on disk and the time has come to gather them all on one disk and back that up.

I do mirror backups (on a mac, using SuperDuper which is mac-only) so I can boot off the backup disk.

I also back up every one of my external disks, which have just about all my photos and saved articles. The phone gets hooked up to the computer for backups of phone photos, so they are part of the mix.

I quite honestly don't save any photos inside a photo program, because those change, and as plain old files, I get to sort them, rearrange and rename them as needed. No "import and export" needed.

But I'll say that the lessons I learned with film, like trying to get exposure just right, and framing photos as I shoo them, have paid back enormously,

I still shoot some film.
Ken Rockwell gives some reasons.
https://kenrockwell.com/tech/why-we-love-film.htm

I save film shooting for the super-ultra-best occasions, like a planned revisit to Sentinel Dome and Taft Point WHEN THE SNOW CLEARS (officially) from Glacier Point Road in Yosemite!!!!

plus digital, of course

[justaprogressive]

5. you need a dup finder!

Totally free, very fast, former Pricelessware listing, I use it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120110171900/http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/2009/2009pl.category.php]



https://www.dupdetector.com/

[Marthe48]

8. Thanks!

I bookmarked the thread