
Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics - phlux
I have 16+ gigs of pics that I have no easy way to organize. What methods/applications do you use to organize all your pictures?
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wccrawford
Hash them and store them in folders by the first few characters of the hash.

You said 'organized', but didn't say HOW.

If you don't tell us what kind of organization you're looking for, there can
be no meaningful answers.

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tibbon
I use Apple's Aperture. I have around 200GB of photos organized in there.

When I dump a flash card to the computer (using Aperture), I then remove the
card, and delete it manually on the camera.

Then I go through a quick pass in aperture rating everything that is just a
poor/duplicate shot as '-1', so that it can go into my deletion bin. Ones that
are exceptional get marked to '1' at that point. Most don't get rated. This is
a really quick pass.

Then I make a second pass where I can start making more decisions.

A third pass is generally required to figure out what is really decent, worth
uploading/printing/retouching.

Fortunately, 16GB of photos isn't too much to organize. Around 450-500 images
on my camera.

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mrlyc
"When I dump a flash card to the computer (using Aperture), I then remove the
card, and delete it manually on the camera."

A safer way would be to keep at least two copies of your photos at all times.
I delete mine from the card only after they are on my hard drive and backed up
on an external drive.

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joshuacc
Depending on why you need them organized, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to
tag photos based on content might be a viable solution.

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joelhooks
we store around 500gb of photos currently. They are stored with two
classifications. Our photography studio and our family photos. Both are
organized chronologically with a top level folder that is the year. Within
that folder we have 1 through 12 for the months and then each month is divided
up to events (and sometimes the specific date).

All of the photos are backed up daily to a 1TB RAID1 NAS and monthly to a
single 1TB hard disk that rotates to my mother in laws house. My rule of thumb
is three copies if you don't want to lose it.

It is important to keep in mind that 16+ gigs of photos is only going to grow
over time. That is where we started too.

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portman
Here's what we do.

We have 120GB of photos from the last 4 years (when our first kid was born).
They are in folders:

    
    
      - Year 
      - Month (starting with #, ie "5. May"
      - Outing (ie "Air & Space Museum")
    

Photos that are just around the house are in the root of the month folder.

This makes it easy to search for specific events and vacations (based on the
descriptive "outing" folder name), but the weakness is that it's hard to find
a particular 'round the house pic if we forget what month it was taken.

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bjg
I always found Picasa's organization of photo's pretty useful.

It automatically categorizes the photo's by date, you can also set it up to do
automatic/guided facial recognition.

Another nice feature is the integration with a lot of online services.

<http://picasa.google.com/>

Demo video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYO2uhrIZJ4>

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pbhjpbhj
I use digikam on KDE (Kubuntu) and tag images - it, like most does geo tags
and date ordering automatically (so you can search by calendar or using a map
to locate where|when images were taken).

I've just checked and I have 8500 images which surprised me a little.

Picassa is really good - I tried to get it to tag my images with facial
recognition data but I couldn't do it without switching over and I'm happy
with digikam for now. I'm rather hoping this feature will appear (perhaps via
GSoC; <http://libface.sourceforge.net/file/Download.html>) in the next year or
so.

iPhoto does excellent facial recognition and works rather well on large
volumes or images (based on my limited play with it of about an hour or so).

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woodall
I do not use this personally, however, friend's of mine REALLY like organizing
their photos on FaceBook. There they can tag photos, share photos, and even
hide them.

My suggestion, upload them to FaceBook. Note: I am telling you something that
I personally would do, but if you do not mind it then go ahead.

Use your friends as MechTurks; I mean who knows you best? FaceBook does have
an album limit of 1000, but you can have unlimited albums[1]. Have your
friends tag things, comment, and generally help you! After all that is said
and done, spider your albums.

I do like the 'back upiness' to all of that, but I do not know if FaceBook
preserves the originals. I do know that they store your photos for up too, if
not more than, one year after the deletion date.

[1][http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/photos.up...](http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/photos.upload)

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sliverstorm
There's really no solid way to auto-organize photos besides the organizing a
photo suite like Picasa will do based on album names and such.

You've just got to sit down and go through a couple hundred pics and sort
them, call it a day, do another couple hundred pics tomorrow, ad nauseum until
you're done. Then make sure to stay on top of organizing new photos as they
come in.

The hidden benefit is you wind up looking at all your photos! That's what you
have them for- to look at! And without motivation, the odds are slim you'll
look at them all. (If you're a professional photographer and the photos are
not of your life/family/friends but that of your clients, obviously just
organize by client/job/)

P.S. there is ONE real sorting method- extract the metadata and divide into
folders based on date. It's not very good, but it's the only one I know of you
can automate.

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piramida
I have 25gb pics without video, storing in folders by year-place or year-
event, and having all that stream to picasa + google online storage (cheap, 5$
per year for 21GB).

This way you have all pictures online to annoy friends from any computer +
picasa does the face detection, so you only have to add non-human tags for
later searches (I'm usually lazy).

Anyway, picasa makes it easy to find a particular photo even if you don't have
it tagged, works both on mac and pc, and also flawlessly works with online
storage.

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thelastnode
The regular way to do this would be just trudging through them after grouping
by date or something.

A cooler way (albeit significantly harder, at least until it's working) way to
do this would be to consider it an AI classification problem... maybe with
enough training (as you go, since you'll be organizing anyways), it can start
to suggest categories, so you can just hit accept as you fly through your
pictures!

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lotides
OS X users — Use MetaDataMover to move and rename automagically based on
embedded metadata. I have folders for year, month and day. The file name
includes the camera name (we have several) and a sequential #. We try to
remove poor photos as soon as we download them. In 30 years you're not going
to want to look through gigs of photos, you just want to see the best (and
most memorable) ones.

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luckydude
tl;dr: I version control mine so I have backups, can share them with my
mother, and here are some scripts that will help you do part of that.

I wrote a script to extract the dates and rename each photo to the date:

<http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/jpg2date>

and you use it like

jpg2date *.jpg | sh -x

Then, like other people, I organize them by YYYY/MM/photos.

I also version control them in BitKeeper which has a binary asset mode (BAM)
that works really well for this sort of thing. It wraps the photos in a pretty
decent CRC, can use hardlinks for checkout (I can checkout 60GB of photos in a
second), and because it is a distributed SCM I can push them to my mom's place
in Florida where I have her mac's screensaver pointed at them.

So California has to fall into the ocean and Florida needs to blow up before I
lose my photos. And I take that part pretty seriously, losing the photos would
suck. Not because they are great, just because they are the record of my
family.

I also put the entire lot up on the web (well, less anything that would make
our nazi police think it's kiddy porn, no shots of the kids playing in the
bath, don't get me started on how retarded our society has become). That
script is written in our little programming language, L, but you could
translate it to perl easily:

<http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/photos/etc/igal-it.l>

and it generates the layout here:

<http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/photos>

I need to put some html in there so you don't have to manually move month to
month but you get the idea.

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tomjen3
Write a short program to extract the meta data from your photos, organize them
in clusters of dates and volia they are organized.

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balu
Nice question. I got about 200GB all organized within iPhoto. Size comes from
the pictures being mostly saved in RAW. Still, iPhoto becomes slow. I moved
the library to an external hd to have free space on my internal one.

I fear the day I got to dig through every picture I made and decide if it is
worth keeping or not. :-/

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iaskwhy
I'm thinking out loud here but I believe most people fear that day so I'm
wondering whether a service which everyday would ask you to choose between a
couple of pictures (say order 10 pictures), you would easily get at least 1000
pictures per years organized. Does it sound any good?

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terra_t
How about a service where you can pay people to do it for you, maybe, say, 10
cents an image?

~~~
iaskwhy
The immediate problem I see with it is how does that person know how to do it
my way? At least when I look at some pictures from a trip I don't always
choose the most obvious as my favorite, there's some emotional aspect to some
picture that is much more powerful than just the quality of the picture
itself.

That said, maybe I'm in the minority and it would actually work!

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natch
I love iPhoto Library Manager (<http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/>). I doubt
you'll find anything completely automatic... well other than wccrawford's
hashing idea.

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there
it probably depends on what the pictures are of and what you need to use them
for in the future.

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withoutasound
If what you want is to organize by date taken, have a look at this ruby
script: [http://al3xandr3.github.com/2008/11/25/ruby-foto-
organizer.h...](http://al3xandr3.github.com/2008/11/25/ruby-foto-
organizer.html)

