Consolidating and organizing images

kartvelo

Well-Known Member
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Aug 12, 2003
10,461
At home
If we're stuck mostly at home for another month or two, this would be a great time to tackle a project I was hoping to do in retirement. Retirement is off the table for me, but here's the project:
I have a bazillion photos from digital cameras and scanned images of old photo prints, scattered across multiple hard drives (internal drives, external drives, thumb drives, SD cards, etc.). Over the years I've backed them up haphazardly; as a result, I can never find an image that I want, and have duplicates of many of the images stored all over the place.

If I could manage to dump everything I can find onto one drive, is there software that can crawl through the folder structures, pull out all the images, and collect and organize them in some way that I can easily peruse them at my leisure and clean up dupes, organize things into folders that make sense, etc.?
 

tbrown_01923

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 29, 2006
780
https://yourstory.com/mystory/top-5-duplicate-photo-cleaners-for-windows-10
I gave never used any - but basic duplicate detection is a simple Computer Science problem (essentially hash the images and if any two images have the same hash they are likley 99.x% to be the same - dependnt on the collsiion rate of the hash). I wouldn't think you would need to pay for that. Something like "these are very related" is a much more difficlut problem and might be worth paying for...
 

kartvelo

Well-Known Member
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Aug 12, 2003
10,461
At home
Anyone used one? I'd need it to crawl folders, show me dupes, let me look at them and choose what to do, but not all in one sitting...

Edit: Testing a few now.
 
Last edited:

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
XnviewMP is free, very customizable and can find duplicates. I'm not too keen on the default layout but it can easily be changed to match just about anything else (each element can be moved, resized or even eliminated from the main window). Windows only. Classic XnView has a slightly different feature set, also completely free, both available as both 32 or 64x apps.
 

kartvelo

Well-Known Member
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Aug 12, 2003
10,461
At home
Well, the app I'm testing at the moment on a single external drive has been running for 8 hours and has scanned 1.1 million files and "processed," whatever that means, 590K. The progress bar is about halfway. Eager to see the results.

Edit: 10:30AM the next day. Still "processing" the last 3500 of the 1.1 million files.
 
Last edited: