Photo Organizing Software?? (sort out duplicates)

[OKnewguy]

Hey gang, I would like to pick the TBN brain. I have a seperate 80 (or something drive) that is used just for photo's. My problem is that some of my family are not very organized with their photo's when they dump from the camera. They often do not delete old pictures on the sd cards and then next time these photo's are downloaded again. This has happened over and over and now I have about 25 gigs of photos, but I would not be surpised if 8 gig are duplicates. Is there a program that could sort out the duplicates??? The thought of going thru these files is mind boggling! I pride myself on being pretty computer savy, but I have not come up with anything yet.
Thanks, Dave

 

[MrJimi]

There was a member that uses piccasa by google and he loves it, I don't know much about it but you could do some reading about it and see if it's for you
here is the link to it
MikePA: Removed link to incorrect site that contained spyware.
Jim

 

[Tig]

I googled search "duplicate files" and came up with many programs, none of which I have used. If I had to choose I would start with this one from PC word
As with any "free" program make sure you have anti spyware software installed. I use Adaware by Lavasoft and Spybot search and destroy. Spybot has a nice immunize feature that seems to keep things clean.

 

[MossRoad]

Perhaps you could just sort them by the created date, then do a thumbnail view of them. All of the duplicates should be sitting next to each other.

 

[zeuspaul]

I sort by size in Windows Explorer....probably the same as a date sort.

Zeuspaul

 

[dubba]

I hate to mention it, but the real picasa website is here Picasa

The other link above took me to a fake site that set off my spyware..

 

[OKnewguy]

Thanks for all the tips, I am going to try some of the software and see how it goes.
Dave

 

[PBinWA]

You could try Extensis Portfolio Font Managers - Creative Asset Management - Font Management - Digital Asset Management

I think they have a fully functional 30 day demo.

 

[Mickey_Fx]

What I do is use Irfanview (free) as my pic viewer. It is a very popular viewer. Not only is it a viewer there are some editing features and it can read text and hex files and can convert from one file format to another. Has a thumbnail viewer and slide show.

I set up a series of directories for orgainizing the pics. For categories that are repeating I set up sub-dirs. i.e. Vacation then 06, 07, etc. Have one dir I call new pics and dump memory cards to that dir. Prgm prompts if dups are found. From that dir I can move pics one at a time or in groups to other dir I've set up. You can either move or copy to other dirs.

It's simple, free and works for me. IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide

 

[SnowRidge]

I hate to mention it, but the real picasa website is here Picasa

The other link above took me to a fake site that set off my spyware..

It's not the Google Picasa site for sure, and the spelling isn't the same. I passed it to the mods. I hope they pull it.

 

[OKnewguy]

Thanks guys, I used Tigs sugestion and ran the simple duplicate program. I think from now on I will try and dump the pics before my wife or girl do. I keep it very organized, but when other people go and clean out the camera (usually last minute on the way to a party) things are not done right. I cleared out half of the drive. It also cought numerous duplicates in our music section on this drive.
Thanks for the tips, Dave

 

[hayden]

I'm using iView Media Pro to organize and manage about 40,000 photos, and it's pretty good. They were bought by Microsoft recently adn the product has some new name now, but if you google iView Medio Pro I'm sure you'll find it.

 

[Tig]

The irony is, my wife does the same thing with our photos and I have not cleaned it up yet.

 

[Grrrr]

I think I may have been the Picasa fan

It does a great job of organising photos and once you install it it will go through all your photos and put them in chronological order from the date that they were taken. It will spit them into years and months taken.

I think that if it finds duplicate photos it will give you the option to delete them.

Also, if you use it to upload the photos, it will only upload photos it doesn't already have.

I have found that it also works nicely over a network with Picasa on each PC pointing to a shared directory. It will keep each one in sync and if you change something on one PC it wil mirror it on all the others.

And it won't change the organisation of your photos in your My Pictures so if you decided you don't like it all will be the same as before you installed it.

BTW, I have nothing at all to do with Picasa but would reccomend it to anyone, and I have tried many of the much more expensive ones.

It is also a very small download.

 

[Gatorboy]

You should get yourself a program such as Downloader Pro, that will download your files, rename them on the fly, put them in folders that have organization by say, Date and prevent you from downloading different copies of the same file over and over (duplicates).

I believe this comes as a 30-day free trial -- it's very useful IMO.

 

[RobS]

I'm really loving Adobe Lightroom, but it might be overkill for what you are doing. When you say "duplicates", do you mean actual duplicate files or just similar pictures of the same subject (different files)?

 

[OKnewguy]

Man, the good tips keep coming. Maybe I do need to check out some of these photo software. I do have roxio media suite, and it does a lot of these functions, but the program has a bug and needs to be re installed. I have lost my install disk and tech support will not send a new disk even though they have me in the system when I originally registered it. They just want you to order the latest version, but what I had worked great, and the latest versions seem bugier to me ( I used to use them at work).
By duplicates, they were actual duplicate files exactly alike.
Thanks, Dave

 

[ragkar]

I have a similar problem to yours, but mine is bigger. Much bigger. Like about 300,000 pics using 27GB.
I use doublepics to find duplicates. It is a shareware program found here:

http://www.doublepics.net/index.cms?FQT=en.DoublePics.Start&CurrentSessionID=VYTYFjNRx6HJjgcPAkRZ

This program uses file comparison algorithms to find files of similar content (adjustable) with variations in size, brightness, saturation intensity and color hue. It presents the candidates in a side by side view so that you may pick either.

There is a trialware version of this software at the site.

 

[Tig]

I started using picasa to sort out dups. Seems to work very well. It even found dups that do not have the same name. The big problem is the volume of duplicates to sort through. I'll have to attach a secondary monitor to sort through this and get organized.