[jmdeegan]

What is the popular tool to use? i have a ton of images (probably 50% duplicates) on 2 external hard drives. In an effort to reclaim some space, i am burning folders to DVD and keeping only one copy of each image on the HDD....but I am debating on what to use in order to best catalog the images and correctly ID and ignore dupes.

Basically, my plan was this:
manually go through the folders and sorta weed through. Some are going to be obvious and easy, like the unprocessed RAW dumps where I end up with three DCIM folders, one with 3 one with 5 one with 7 subfolders....stuff like that should be easy to deal with.

But once I do that, I was going to let software find, sort and catalog the images.
I have iPhoto, Picasa2, Lightroom and a demo of Aperture.

Lightroom chokes on importing the whole drive, so I will probably offer up smaller folders as opposed to searching a 500gb drive.
Aperture, I need to check the config. The trial folder has 10gb of images and would not import more, said the drive was too small even though I have 150gb free and was not importing 100gb of data
Did not really lean on iPhoto or Picasa2 yet. I prefer the Picasa2 windows interface, so that is part of the reasoning there.

I think I want to work on Aperture more, just at first blush I like how it catalogs images better than Lightroom. Maybe LR can be better, but out of the box no changes other than creating a destination folder, and was very nice.

Just wanted to see if theres another I've missed/should give a try to? Basically, I want to know that the XXX GB of images I have left are all unique, named and catalogged nicely, doing as little manual work as possible. Don't need to be checking thousands of images....

[rparmar]

i have a ton of images (probably 50% duplicates) on 2 external hard drives. In an effort to reclaim some space, i am burning folders to DVD and keeping only one copy of each image on the HDD.

I hope you mean one copy on each of the hard drives. Three copies is the minimum I would want of any critical files.

Once in my life I even had three copies of critical work fail at the same time. However I consider that unlikely in this day and age (DVD is more robust than helical scan tape). But reducing down to only two copies is a risk I would not take.

[jmdeegan]

I had not actually firmed up the decision, but in all likelihood it would be three copies-one on DVD, one on an external drive and one on the native HDD.

However, I also wouldn't sweat having just two copies, because more often than not that's how I tend to run and thus far it's been OK. None of these are client images, its all just snapshots and whatnot, so I don't deem any to be as critical as others could be.

Either way, my biggest push is to clean up the one drive-I have a 500gb external which I got careless with the space and have way too many dupes, so it's probably got a lot more free space to be reclaimed.
That, and I want to try and remove the 500gb drive from my travels. I bumped my laptop drive to 320, and have two small 120gb drives, so if I can make the 500gb a stay-at-home/TimeMachine backup drive, I am reducing bulk for my travels (previously, I had my iTunes library on that drive, but it was becoming a PITA, and those files were bigger than my original internal drive had space for)

[baw]

If the number of images is substantial (like above 20.000) you may want to take a serious look at IMatch.
It's database capabilities are robuust, and it has some nice features to find possible duplicate images.

[sabarrett]

I too have a large amount of images. Right now I am using cam2pc as my image downloader and organizer. It downloads into folders named by date(2008-04-28 - Kids playing outside) and then renames the files serially by date (2008-04-28 - 0001). Great at organizing!! Quick, simple, and clean. It does some editing, however I do most my edit work in PSE or Picassa. Every few months, I take and put the folders into a yearly grouping, just to keep things organized somewhat.

As far as backups, I put a server in my basement (old system filled with hard drives), running freenas and then I have syncback do a backup of a portion of my hard drive each day of the week. Also, each quarter I make an incremental backup of my library on DVD and put it in the safe deposit box.

The one thing I wish for is a good way to put tags in the pictures. I have not found a great way yet. What I imagine is a program where I can pre-fill in a database with the names, events, keywords, etc. Then I can apply these to the pictures I select, and this data gets saved in the exif. There are exif editors out there, however they all want me to type in the info each time. I know I am not that good! There is no way I can type all that stuff over and over again and not get any typos or other anomalies in my pictures. If the data is not consistent, it destroys the integrity of the database. I tried the PSE organizer, and it just crawls with the pictures we have. Granted, my pc is not current generation, but all I am doing is just tagging images, not building a bridge!

[sabarrett]

one more thing = I often have to rename files I get from others by date to fit them into the structure. I use a program called - oddly enough - bulk rename utility. Great program. Lots of parameters on how to rename files based on date, prefix, suffix, replace, etc. Works great!

[baw]

EXIF info isn't meant to be changed after the image is taken. You can use IPTC info for that, or the Adobe controlled XMP info.
For your dbase needs have a look at IMatch. It has a tree like category setup, which is great for organising your images.
For IPTC entry you can setup Thesaury to make data entry fast and faultless.

[sabarrett]

I have heard of imatch before from other postings. I just downloaded it and will try it out. However, tell me more about thesaury? I can't really find anything that looks relevant on google? Is it a program or app that runs on my side, or is it a service on the web? I seem to only come across rss related stuff.

[wiseman]

ACDSee Pro 2 is a good program which does allow you to batch set information in IPTC, EXIF, and the Database. It is not free. There is a 30 day trial I believe.

[baw]

I have heard of imatch before from other postings. I just downloaded it and will try it out. However, tell me more about thesaury? I can't really find anything that looks relevant on google? Is it a program or app that runs on my side, or is it a service on the web? I seem to only come across rss related stuff.

In Imatch thesaury are part of the IPTC editor. You can create lists of Keywords etc. to choose from when entering them. Saves typing, and makes sure they're all spelled the same. Handy when searching