Photo Organization

[555Filk]

I have a mess with my home photos. I have photos strewn across many hard drives and backup images made by super-duper. Very few are named with anything other than what the camera named them. Many of the photos are more than triplicate since I have backups of backup etc. I am looking for a way to consolidate and organize and de-dupe all of the images. I heard Lightroom might be a good option.

I am thinking of plugging in each drive that might contain photos and opening each backup image and pointing Lightroom to each one and do an import with the “Add” option so the images stay where they are but are added to the LR Catalog. Once all the images are added to the catalog I could begin the process of moving them to a new LR catalog by taking a year at a time through filters and dragging the photos to a new blank drive with the option to not import duplicates and rename as necessary. This would remove them from the many drives and images. Will this process work and is it something do-able? I was thinking by “adding” them first and then moving I would know all images were originally cataloged and accounted for and the images left behind would be duplicates and could be deleted. I am looking for a good way to get a handle on this huge photo mess.

 

[robgendreau]

I'm afraid there is no easy automatic route.

I'd concentrate on getting together all your originals, the stuff you wanna keep. If you think stuff is missing, like "hmm, what happened to those Mar a Lago vacation shots?" then you go and find them from the backups and add them back to originals.

Once that's done, even if you have some duplicates within, back that up. In two places.

At that point, you should be confident you have all the stuff you wanted. And two back ups of that. So just chuck the other backups. And start over with a better backup system (this is where, IMHO, Time Machine excels over some other backup strategies in that it keeps the same structure and will delete old stuff that you've deleted after a period of time).

Lr is the most comprehensive organizing tool. It could help to add (ie reference in place) all the original images. Then yes, you could move them about, keyword them, etc all within Lr. But no, don't use another catalog. You can't move images from one catalog to another without an export/import process, basically. Use ONE catalog.

But if your existing folder structure is beyond hope, then maybe use Lr's ability to sort stuff out at import. Figure out where you've got some space and make room for the images. Then import all your originals using move instead of add. Use the destination pane to just use dated folders. Maybe add some keywords just in case via a preset (like "moved" so you can find those if you have to stop the process mid way eg). Lr will then take those images and begin to put 'em all in dated folders. That would make some stuff easier to find, and get images from a shoot back together with their mates, even if they'd been renamed or something. Then you could always add descriptive stuff to the folder names in Lr later.