150GB of pics to sort

hesaias

I am in the process of sorting out my archive. I have decided to do it by year and month, but the 150,000 or so files is overwhelming. I want to keep the highest resolution RAW files, and any edited copies, but I have a bunch of duplicates. Anybody have any suggestions about how to streamline this? I have 6 years of stuff to wade through:scratch

ivar

hesaias wrote:

I am in the process of sorting out my archive. I have decided to do it by year and month, but the 150,000 or so files is overwhelming. I want to keep the highest resolution RAW files, and any edited copies, but I have a bunch of duplicates. Anybody have any suggestions about how to streamline this? I have 6 years of stuff to wade through

Personally, I'd start sorting it by year first. Make folders for each year that you have photos. Then, once that's done, start doing months on a year by year basis. Then, I'd do the sorting/comparing/deleting.

That's the way I would do it in a nutshell, but I think no matter what way you'd go about it it's going to be a lot of work/overwhelming anyway.

Take it small steps.

Good luck

colourbox

I would strongly suggest intensively learning the rating, labeling, and keywording features of your favorite photo organizer, whether that's Photo Mechanic, Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, ACDSee, Aperture, or whatever.

What you want to do is become so comfortable with the single-key shortcuts for marking photos, that you can blow through hundreds of files an hour just by pressing a key to mark a photo, then pressing the right arrow key to move to the next photo. For example, if all you did was assign a label meaning "duplicate," you could arrow through your photos and hit the label shortcut key to mark all the duplicates. "Next...ok...next...DUPE...next...DUPE...next...ok...next...ok..."

Then once they are all marked you use the filtering feature of your software to "show everything marked Duplicate, hiding all the rest," meaning that you can delete all duplicates in a single step.

That's just an example. You need to get into the "mark, then filter, then act" rhythm with shortcuts if you'd like to save days of your life during this process. You can do this process for applying categories, keywords, marking favorites, etc.

You may want to hang out on the DAM Book Forums for more discussion and tips, and read that guy's book, The DAM Book (DAM = Digital Asset Management).

BradfordBenn

Also if you import them into Lightroom it will often times find the dupes and do the grouping into folders for you. You just have to set the settings properly on import.

No matter what you do, it is just going to take a bunch of time. I also agree with learning the keys quickly as that is a huge timesaver.

Nikolai

Let me through a monkey wrench here...

Taking a very basic assumptions, this work would take you about 2.5 months if you work full time 8 hours a day under the most ideal circumstances. No piss breaks, no distractions, no nothing. More realistically, I'd say it looks like 6 months. Now - does this whole sorting out and archiving thing really mean that much to you? How often do you think you gonna come back for those 6 year old pictures? How fast do you think you will need to be able to find any particular image that it would justify wast...I mean, spending half a year moving bits and bytes around?

I myself maybe a bad example, but when I'm looking at my shots from 6 years ago... Well... some of them do bring good memories, but quality wise....:cry

But if you're adamant about your intentions... I recently helped one feller to sort out his several years worth of pictures by automatically breaking them into year/moth/[ day [ / event] ] structure, like Ivar suggested. And my process even removed some obvious dups (which were like 10% of the whole volume). It is not a free service, mind you, but if you interested in doing something like that in a matter of days as opposed to weeks and months - let me know.