genocolo Loc: Vail and Gasparilla Island

I am sure that some of you have experienced the daunting task of organizing voluminous number of photos. I have all ready researched and read many articles on the internet and reviewed many of the relevant topics on UHH. I have consulted a computer expert, who did not know as much as I know about photos, organization, etc. I still have not been able to come up with a good plan to attack this problem and achieve my goals set out below.

I am working on a 250gb MacBook pro. I have photos on google photos (54,973), flickr (8,120 and 95,838 on two different accounts), iCloud, back blaze, sandisk (210 gb), and on various other external drives and older computers. I believe that flickr and google photos have pretty much found all my photos spread over all the devices, but I am sure that many, many of the above are duplicates

My goals are to (as efficiently as possible):
1.get all photos in one place
2.identify and delete duplicates without deleting keepers
3.create albums/folders/etc for each year, with special events like travel within each year
4.make slideshows/movies/etc of each year so that I can show them to family on hd tv using something like apple tv.
5.backup all of the above so that they are available to my family for years to come

I am aware of and have tried such software as duplicate photo fixer pro, duplicate sweeper, photo sweeper, and power photos. They all seem to work but I have to get all the photos in one place to really expect them to do their job. I also have Lightroom and basic knowledge of it. I know it is a powerful organizer if done right.

I have tried to download all my flickr photos but was overwhelmed by the time and the inefficiency of its download process. Same with Google.

Please help me with your experience and advice. Thanks in advance.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

FWIW - I would suggest that the first step is to get all the photos onto one computer, with a large external hard disk to hold them all, at least a 1 TB, if not larger. Anymore a 2 or 3 TB external hard drive is pretty cheap, the more space the better.

For your Flickr photos you can make use of Flickr Downloadr ( https://flickrdownloadr.com/ ) to download all your images in one shot. Of course depending on your download speed and the number of images that still may take some time. Problem I saw with this was that the EXIF data might disappear, but you will end up with JPG versions of your images.

Google Photos - Have you tried Google Take out? https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout#


Once you get your Google & Flickr photos onto your one computer - use a program like Lightroom (If you have Lightroom then learn to use it for its organizing strength). You can set up any folder structure you like to organize your photos, import them into Lightroom and forever have control over managing them easily.

Images that are already on your disk or on SD cards are easily imported into Lightroom and your organized library of images, so that finally everything can be in ONE location, managed by a DATABASE (Lightroom).

If you are not familiar with how to use Lightroom, plenty of getting started, intermediate and advanced video tutorials on the Internet. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmXfFxjdp3CHCRpDULlvcaqWfK_zLPWF2

Take your time as you work thru the processes and good luck!

tresap23 Loc: Texas

I am not sure about the organizing part, but I am about to get an external hard drive for all my photos, so that I don't bog down my PC so much. They have some for around $129.00 for 4 TB's. That is a whole lot of space. I plan to organize pics into folders, then transfer the folders to the external drive. I am transferring from all my Computer cards that are full, so I can reuse them and save money. Once you have them in the hard drive you can access them anytime. You can get small portable ones that work with your MacBook and with your tablets, etc. You can go straight from your camera to your hard drive. Another thing I try to do is rename my images as I upload them to my computer. Example, I just went to Vermont, and I uploaded my pictures from my camera and then went back and selected them all and renamed them Vermont 2017. Now all my images are together. As I was editing them, and saving the edits, this helped keep them together, and not scattered about throughout my pictures. Not sure if this is helpful or not. you can get the storage you need without spending so much money on Icloud, and all the rest. And they are all in one place. Also, if time is an issue, hire you a high school kid ($10/hr) a few hrs a week/month (depending on how big of a hurry your are in) They are pretty fast and Tech savvy!! In the end, you save so much time, it is worth the extra cash, if you have it to spare. Time is money for me. If you have time on your hands, well, maybe you can get it figured out, and start up a new business for yourself. Look at all the dubbing places? I paid to have old VCR recordings transferred to CD's years a go. Good luck!

G Brown Loc: Sunny Bognor Regis West Sussex UK

My guess is that you start to download and then go to bed.....!
Break it down into manageable bits on several external hard drives.
Then decide exactly which ones you want. and put those onto LR from the ExtHD.

Do you really need 'Everything'....life is short and some must have been waiting for PP for a long time already

tresap23 Loc: Texas

So true! Why are photographers like Hoarders, with our pictures. You know you don't need 10 pics, of the same thing, but when you go to delete the 9, we can't choose which one to keep, so we keep them all. I have lots of cleaning up to do!

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

My experience is as follows:

(1) If you don't process and "permanently" index a file quickly, it will be lost in a whole purgatory of unclassified pictures. Now, having said that, I have to admit that mine got a second chance when I went from film to digital, because the digitizing process has forced me to go through all my old media and finally make an "index or trash" decision.
http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-488146-1.html

(2) I use the O/S {in my case Windows} directory/folders system to classify index my pictures. For example, I have a "My Pictures" directory which my personal stuff fits under, including a directory tree for our "family of procreation" {wife and kids}, one for my "family of origin" {my parents and siblings}, one for my wife's "family of origin", one for our trips, etc, etc etc.

Note: I should mention that I take fewer than a thousand unique pictures each year.

inbigd

I'm sure Lightroom is superior (I don't have it yet). You can download / copy all of your photos to your MacBook then use the Smart Albums in Apple Photos to categorize and organize all of them.

selena18

Here's a few discussions about this topic in this link below. Check it out: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-digital-asset-management-systems-for-digital-photos-images

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

The external drive is essential. I also suggest DropBox Pro. You need the security of off-site storage. You can anticipate a drive failure at some point in time. It will happen.

selena18

When it comes to photography, keeping the files organized is the most important things. There are some digital asset management system that can help you streamline processes and save time. In this link below you will find some discussion about that. https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-digital-asset-management-systems-for-digital-photos-images

LysleJr Loc: American in Alabama

I have one 5T drive 55% full two 1T drives and an internal 1T hd. all 3 1T are over 65% full. I like to save my raw files along with PSPimage and assorted Sizes JPEG. Some places will not take anything greater then 25 Meg. One limits to 25 K. I am getting ready to replace the 1T with 4T. I also have over 100 CDs and 30 DVDs with stationary photos. So if you can affort it go bigger. I have each external drive sorted by types of photos.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Your first order of business, as has been suggested, is to get all of your files in one place.

Then you can begin the process of separating them into individual years.

Then months

Then days.

More than likely you have groups of shots you did on the same days - these belong together in their own folder, preferably with a folder name that is descriptive.

Resist the temptation to impose anything more than a simple year-month-day folder structure - DO NOT group your images by content - stick to dates.

Once your images are organized by date, Lightroom will help you do the rest. You point it to the master or top level folder that has all of your images in their respective sub-folders, and tell Lightroom to ADD - NOT COPY - your images to the catalog. There are three other options for adding images to the catalog. Copy, which will make a duplicate of every file - you don't want that. Move - which will move the file from it's current location to a new one, deleting the source file in the process - you don't need to do this at this point. And Copy As DNG - which you would want if you are converting your entire raw file collection to dng - I am pretty sure you don't want to do this either.

Once they are in the catalog - you can begin the painstaking process of looking at each and every file, and suspected dupes, and deleting the unnecessary ones.

After you are relatively cleaned up, you can use virtual collections, special collections, keywords, descriptive file naming etc to organize you images. One file can belong to multiple collections. Lets say you were hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in CA, and you shot some images of bears, mountain lions, golden eagles and marmots. These files could be part of a vacation collection, California collection, predator, big cats, birds of prey, and giant rodents that disable cars. You needn't make multiple duplicates to put these files into their respective category(ies) - that is the whole point of Ligthroom - to help you keep it really simple and highly organized.

There is a lot more to it than that, but this should give you a taste of what's to come.

Once you are organized, your slide shows, sharing and other things will be a lot easier.

Bipod

I've been making computer files for over 50 years, but the oldest one I still have is only about 10 years old.
The rest were on 1/2" tape, QIC tape, 5 1/4" floppy, Quantum drives, Zip drives, etc. One either can't buy a drive,
or the magnetic information on the tape has bled through.

CDR and 3 1/4" floppy diskette drives are still obtainable, but for how much longer?

The information itself was stored as Wordstar, Perfect Writer, troff, dBase IV, DataFlex,
Informix, files in tar and cpio archives compressed with compress, zip, pkzipo, gzip, etc.
And various vesrsion of each format, archive format and compression algorithm.
The Rosetta Stone is easier to read.

All computer files eventually get lost. Hard drives die, backups become unreadable, media
become obsolete, files are accidentally deleted, and "cloud" providers go out of business
and their disk drives go into the dumpster.

John Keats' epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Feb. 24, 1821

But I still have all my negatives.

Bipod

Maybe I gave the wrong impression: reading an old computer file is very simple!
All you need is:

1. Medium that is still readable

2. A drive that is capable of reading the medium.

3. A file system software for the medium (if random access)

4. Device driver software for the drive

5. The correct programs and versions to:
a. Uncompress the file
b. Extract the archive
c. Read the actual data file

6. Operating system capable of loading and running:
* the necessary device driver(s)
* the necessary file systems
* the uncompression program
* the archive extraction program
* the viewer/reader program
All must be the right versions to match the
media and to work with each other.

7. Any bug patches needed to make all the above work.

8. System that can boot the OS and that is capable
of attaching to the drive and to such other
drives are are ncessary to load the drvice driver
and programs.

9. Knowlege to install and configure all the above--
without having done so in 10 or 20 years.

10. All required passwords and license keys.

What could be simpler?

Chuck B

Thank you for the google link. It is very difficult for me to export their files, at least for me.