photofreak8573 Loc: surprise, arizona (when not in motor home)

I hope this doesn't get too long, but here's my problem. I wasn't too familiar with LR5. Started importing pix on my PC (Win8) through Picasa AND LR. I did that for a while then got a new Apple Mac (not familiar with that either). So, I imported through Photos AND LR on there and also continued to import same photos to PC.
I backed up everything to an external HD.
Then it got worse---I decided to restore all my photos (going back as far as 2005) to the Mac (in LR) ignoring dups, so i could try to get organized. Well, I filled my Mac HD before I could restore everything.
Gets even more worse (if possible)...i have 3 separate external HD's. I never had a b/u procedure and would just copy the pix from PC to the external drive (so i have multiple copies of the same pix across multiple external hd's)...
I've been manually going through and trying to find these dups..there's a program i found for the pc (doesn't work on mac) called Awesome Duplicate File Finder. it helps on the internal drive, but doesn't seem to work on the external drives.
And the last piece of this messy puzzle is that I'm in a remote area of Maine (great photo ops abound!) and don't have access to buying new external HD...
any ideas of how to get out of my pickle? i don't want to sit in the motor home all day working on the computers when i could be out shooting, but will do whatever it takes to get organized...
thanks for reading all this and i look forward to some magic wands you guys offer!

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

I'm sitting my my motorhome too! I'm at a motorhome rally in Branson and went to a Picassa seminar yesterday.

Lightroom and Piccasa NEVER delete the originals. They can, if you force them, but they won't unless you make them.

In my view, it never works well to use multiple organizers. Pick one. If you pick Lightroom, I would suggest you start with a brand new catalog. Get busy shooting and use Lightroom to manage the new ones. When you like what you are doing, begin importing (and moving) your old stuff in to the new catalog. But, do it in pieces.

(If you are in the USA, you are never out of Amazon's reach. You can get a new drive in a day or two!)

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

There is an App in the App Store called Gemini: The Duplicate Finder. It is $9.95 and recommended by David A. Cox of PC Classes Online/Tech Talk America. While I am a Mac convert, I found when I had a windoze computer that his information was useable to fix windows problems and his apple expertise is better than his PC expertise, and his you tube videos are to the point.

Crwiwy Loc: Devon UK

There are plenty of good free duplicate finders on the Internet
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-duplicate-file-remover.htm

I would recommend Anti Twin - it is very good and comprehensive.

jethro779 Loc: Tucson, AZ

That may be true, I just brought this one up because it can be used for other file types as well.

Crwiwy Loc: Devon UK

Anti Twin works on all file types I have tried - and it's free.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

Winter is coming. There will be lots of days the only reason for going outside is life or death serious. You can do the looooooooooooooooong slow sorting and organizing then. Go on Amazon and order an external drive large enough to hold all your photos from all the drives. Then working with only one drive at a time go through each one and re-organize, rename etc. and place them on the new drive. Keep extensive notes to help keep them all straight. When done with one drive move on to the next and repeat. When you have them all done and organized on the one drive then pick one of the old ones, or buy another new one if they are too small and make a backup or clone with something like Acronis and refresh or renew the backup on a regular schedule. You will now have two copies of everything (except changes since the last backup, you will only have one of that, I have Acronis set to do an incremental daily and a new full after every 5th incremental, then I only keep three sets, deleting the older ones. really important pictures I keep additional copies on flash drives etc.) You can now format those extra external drives use them as part of this scheme, only organized now. Or repurpose them for other uses.

Oh, yes, pick one organizer and use it all the time. Probably LightRoom since it only recognizes moves made by itself to connect photos to their LR catalogues of edits which are separate from the original files(Yes, your originals are still there, LR just calls them and the edit catalogue up and merges them each time you access them through LR Since you used multiple drives you may have multiple LR catalogues. Someone like Searcher can help you merge them if it is possible. And LR6/CC changes all the edit catalogues to its new format. That means you can't go back to LR5 or earlier without losing the edits.

Of course you could contact the local highschool and ask if any of their resident computer geeks would like to do it for pocket money. Give the kid the full lightroom manual etc and pay him to sort it out for you. Meanwhile you go get an online degree in computer programing so you can understand what the kid did when it is finished.

And, you might have created a local organization and PP expert for you and the other hobby phtographers and given the kid a source of income through high school and beyond since that kind of work can be done on line, even when the kid goes away to college. Of course the job and skills might get passed on to one or more younger geeks at the high school.

sueyeisert Loc: New Jersey

I've always given the advice that before playing around with Lightroom to watch this tutorial. (I speak from my own mistakes.) It's FREE just scroll down and doesn't matter that it's Lightroom 4. http://en.elephorm.com/tuto-lightroom-4-complete-training.html For an external HD it can be shipped to you I'd recommend B&H.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I got Visipics for free, and it's probably still free. It does a good job of finding duplicates.

http://www.visipics.info/index.php?title=Main_Page

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

My approach would be:
1. Purchase another external hard drive that is as large as the total of all your hard drives both internal and external.
2. Make a new LR Catalog and give it a descriptive name like: "New LR Master Catalog".
2. Copy all your photos to the new large external hard drive. I place mine in a subfolder of the newly minted 'New LR Master Catalog" and I call this folder "Images" Here I would keep them in subfolders in "Images" otherwise the base folder an get unwieldy.
3. When all the photos are physically copied, set LR to ignore duplicates.
5. Click Import , select Add and then select the Images folder. Also make sure include subfolders is checked. It is here you can rename the files or whatever you want to do. As you will not be moving the images you will select Add. On you tell it to execute it goes pretty fast, but the previews will take a while to be made.

Silvermeteor Loc: South Carolina, USA

If you plan to use this type of software then I would recommend that you do so before you begin any process with LR.

Once you begin with LR you should always use LR ONLY to move and or delete images.

LR keeps a record of the location of each image and if you move or delete that image with another program then LR will no longer know where to find that image and you will have multiplied your current problems.

MtnMan Loc: ID

Please correct me if I am wrong. But unless you have changed the default in Lightroom to save the exif data with the image files I fear this approach will lose all of the editing you have done.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

You are correct.

So you need to write the XMP sidecar files before doing anything. These will be written to the save folder as the original file (either RAW or jpeg).

See:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/tag/xmp-sidecar-files

or more specifically
http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/18045/how-can-i-force-lightroom-to-export-metadata-for-all-photos
Note to use this method you will have to go to the catalog browser, show all, then select all with cmd+A and do the step: go to menu -> metadata -> Save metadata to file and you're done (I think they have this process cleaned up in LR CC 2015).

Give this plenty of time as it may take a while depending on how many files you will have in your LR archive. This will not do anything for any images not yet in a LR archive.

MtnMan Loc: ID

Should have said xmp. Thanks for that correction.

It is in the preferences. I doubt just changing the preference after the fact will do all the old files. You need do do what the other poster suggested. It can take quite a while if you have a lot of images. I sometimes get messages on closing that it isn't caught up with my recent changes. But it says not to worry as it will finish the job when I restart Lightroom.

Capture48 Loc: Arizona

Sounds like you would be better served to get some education on whatever program you wish to use, and the value of backups.