gray_ghost2 Loc: Antelope, (Sac) Ca.

Over the years I have loaded many photos on several accumilated hard drives. Some photos are copies but most are years of photo's spread over these hard drives.
Question is, are there program's that will corral all these pictures onto one HD and ID the copied photos?

Or let me ask this, how would you gather all your photos off various HD's and organize/sort onto 1HD to later make a backup HD?

I have alot of photos on various HD's. How do I get them sorted and organized?

big-guy Loc: Peterborough Ontario Canada

Import into Lightroom from the old to a new large HD.

gray_ghost2 Loc: Antelope, (Sac) Ca.

Thank you.

nadelewitz Loc: Ithaca NY

Either buy, or find someone who has an external hard drive dock. Copy, or have the someone, or borrow the dock, and copy files from each drive onto your computer. Then you can organize to your heart's content. Finally, copy your organized collection to whatever you want..a hard drive, DVDs, flash drive(s)...for archiving.

Notice that I say COPY back and forth. Don't MOVE any files off the drives they are on until you have your final archive(s). If you don't know the difference, ask someone who knows.

NCMtnMan Loc: N. Fork New River, Ashe Co., NC

Adobe Bridge may help you in this situation.

Stardust Loc: Central Illinois

I did this once back before I was more organized when I had a bunch on various storage devices and wanted to get rid of duplications. (Same concept just different media) I transferred all into a folder on a hard drive, then sorted them by SIZE. Then I just went down the list only having to look at photos that were EXACT in size to see if they were duplications, which 98% were.

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

With lots of sweat and gnashing of teeth. Have you settled on a sorting and cataloging style that makes sense to you

11bravo

I use voidtools.com's Everything for searching and drag&drop the results to TeraCopy to copy as it does checksums on the copied files (check the verify option).

For duplicate checks, I use Heatsoft clone cleaner. I have the paid version which does multiple disks, but the free lite version will check a single drive and subfolders. I like the auto mark feature (specify a "keep" folder and dups in other folders automatically marked for deletion). Groups nicely delimited.

So, find and copy files to destination HDD, then find and delete the clones on this destination drive (leave originals alone, HDD's cheap).

I like the Rosewill HDD enclosure, N82E16817182247 at Newegg, as it has a built-in fan. Finding dups can take a long time, so keeps the HDD cool. I also have used a dock, and have a small floor fan blow on it to keep temps down.

Then use Lightroom to catalog.

gray_ghost2 Loc: Antelope, (Sac) Ca.

Thanks for everyones help.