bkr2 wrote:
Where do I start deleting or saving 44000 pictures. Should I use name list,a date list, a location list.
Should I save adjusted copy's. The list go's on. Help.
You want to delete 44000 pictures? No problem. Place them all into one folder, then delete the folder.
Oh, maybe you didn't want to delete all of them? That will take a bit more work. Before you start, back up all your files. If you make a mistake by deleting the wrong files, you can recover from that.
After about a decade of digital photography, I had about 65,000 photo files. They included the original files when I was shooting jpg plus several different edits of those files so there were a lot of duplicates. I had never deleted anything except the accidental photos of my foot.
The first thing I did was to collect them into folders arranged by date. That can be tricky. I don't know about Mac, but with Windows, if you use File Explorer and check the "Date" column you will get the files listed by date, but it may be the date the file was generated or the date modified or the date the photo was taken. If the file was copied from one disk to another and back, sometimes that changes the date the file was generated. The best thing to do in File Explorer is to look at the "details" view and right click on the list at the top ("Name", "Date", "Type", etc.). The right click will bring up a dialog allowing you to add or subtract columns from that view. Click on "more", and you will get a long list. From that list you can check "Date Taken". When you see that in the File Explorer view, clicking on it will arrange the files by the date the photo was taken (as long as the EXIF data have not been stripped out). That will allow you to move or copy the file to a folder with the appropriate year for a name.
It took me a couple months to go through my 65,000 photos, but in addition to deleting the junk, I was adding keywords in LR for the remaining images. That was working in free time, a couple hours a day. If you're locked down, you might have more free time to spend on this project.
If you use Lightroom, that process can be easier, as you can filter the photos by year. What I did was to generate a smart collection named by year and containing all the photos taken in that year. Then I just exported the collection as a catalog with the year for the name.
Once you have separated the files into years, you can start looking through them one year at a time. Doing it that way reduces the number of images you have to sort all at once, and also makes it easier to keep track of where you are in the process. At that point you can just look at all the photos, pick out the best one from the duplicates, and then delete the others. When you get through all the year folders, you can just combine the best photos back to wherever you keep them.
If you have a lot of files in a year folder, and if you have renamed some of the files so the duplicates are not next to each other you might consider some duplicate finding software. I have used
https://www.duplicate-finder.com/photo.html (freeware) which looks through a folder and makes a list of similar images. It will display the images so you can see how close they are, and it will also give them a rating to indicate how close they are. To use it, you drag a folder into the space at the top of the window when you start the software. You probably want to uncheck "search subdirectories". Then you can search that folder for duplicates. The only problem is the displayed photos are not very large so you might want to just note the names and view them in your normal viewing software.
Keep the backup in case you want to restore something later. So the real answer to "Save or Delete" is "Both". Save them in backup, but delete them in your working folder.