Drowning in sea of digital photos/videos

whitesatin

For the past ten years or so, I have been storing various types of family photos/videos on a range of cds/dvds/memory sticks/laptop/phone etc. etc.

I have them in various places and am adding to them all the time but they are not really in any real order and what I would dearly love to be able to do is to sit down, over a period of time, select those I want to keep and those that I don't. There are thousands, especially now I have grandchildren.

My question is, is there one gadget where I could view and organise and store all my photos with a view to getting them into some kind of chronological order? Like, I suppose, one big photo album to document the years as they go by.

I know I could probably do it by putting it onto my laptop and laboriously sending it to a data storage unit but I am really after something that I could do it all on at the same time.

cookie365

Can you be a bit clearer about what you actually want to do?

You want a device that knows what images are on a stack of DVDs without actually putting the DVDs in your laptop?

Unless we really are living in the Matrix there's no such thing

Your DVDs and memory sticks and laptop hard drives are going to fail sooner or later. If you want to keep the photos, you need to transfer them onto a single medium that you keep backed up.

Either a NAS storage device, or a web photo album service, depending on what you actually want to do.

NiftyDigits

I used to use ACDSee Pro

Don't know how it is these days, but they have a free trial.

googler

You need to figure out how much data you have. For each device, connect it to your PC, and right-click it in My Computer or similar. Select Properties, and it will tell you how much data you have.

Add all these figures up. If they come to less than (say) 1Tb, then you could copy/paste all of them onto one 1Tb drive - but you need a backup, so you can either rely on the current media to do this, or buy two 1Tb drives - one as a primary, the other as a secondary (back-up).

We can't tell you how you want to organise your photos - by subject? by date? That's down to you.

[Deleted User]

I use Google Picasa http://picasa.google.com/

My problem is that i've just got far too many images, i think it was 50k+ photos at the last count. In the 'early years' I put them together in folders by subjects (E.g. Weddings, holidays, parties) and then I started to move over to Year/Month/Day once I had kids

I can't put all the photos on my PC's hard disk as there isn't space, and i've found Picasa isn't amazingly portable HD friendly. It doesn't like my NAS either.

Worse still, I'd love to put them ALL by date, but a lot of the older stuff was never dated properly by my cameras. Also, there's 10 years of badly organised stuff from mobile phones to account for.

At the end of it, the best way to do it is manually going through all your photos, looking at them, trying to date them. Ideally using some tool to add meta-data that will let you re-reorganise them when it suits you.

RumRat

Get children/Grandchildren to help go through them and catalogue them. It will give you the chance to fill in some family history while you still can;).
I'm afraid there is no short cut to what you want. You are going to have to load them all onto something like a portable hard drive via your laptop initially.
When I did mine, I found that a good 55% were of the same events/people and I was able to delete them and still end up with a nice collection.
Once you have them on a Hard Drive, you can think of backing them up into something like Flickr. SEE HERE

lemontart

oh dear feel your pain, get stand alone hard drive (useful to have anyway) go through and save all to that - then a case of wading through

kwikbreaks

Could be worse. It could be a couple of suitcases full of fading prints which I don't doubt plenty of the older generation have - I know I do. I've decided to leave them as a job for future generations.

Strider590

There's this fancy thing called windows explorer......

Seriously I don't see the need for any other solution.

InsideInsurance

Strider590 wrote: »

There's this fancy thing called windows explorer......

Seriously I don't see the need for any other solution.

Windows Explorer only allows you to organise them by a small amount of criteria.

The advantage of photo management software is that you can have a whole host of tags applied to them and then you can call out photos by those tags.

For example pulling in photos from my phone it will automatically pick up the location of the photo was taken, date, does a reasonable job of picking out who was in the photos etc. I can then manually apply additional tags or names.

So if your parents come round and you want to show them all the photos of their grandkids or the photos from your USA holiday its only a couple of clicks. Similarly if you want all the photos you've taken over the years at the Tate Modern you dont have to remember each time you've been.

Yes you could do a naming convention of date - country - city - location - event - names. jpg but doing this everytime you copy in a few hundred photos is a major pain -v- software that will do it automatically and also maintain it automatically should someone marry and their name change etc.

Strider590

What's wrong with a folder dated backwards so it appears in the correct order in windows.... Example: 20140523_Spain
or use subfolders too:
C:/Photos/20140523_Spain/Beach/
C:/Photos/20140523_Spain/Restuarant/
C:/Photos/20140523_Spain/Museum/

Note not using spaces, this makes it easy to move files around (at a later date) using MS DOS instead of expensive backup software.

Then you just dump your images into your folders without renaming the files.

Only complete retards use descriptive filenames, the file order is far more important (which ^^ seems to understand, but i'll say it anyway).

I have over 8000 images and I have no issue locating them.

As for tagging, keep that sh*t on Facebook. When I come back with an average 600 photos I don't have time to sit their putting tags on them all and what if you miss one? Becoming reliant on that nonsense is a great way to lose your files!

Seriously, it's not hard to create a few folders and that really is all you need to do.
It's shocking how many people don't grasp this simple concept.

As for finding files according to date, that's part of the explorer search feature, has been for decades. Select created date from and to, hit search and hey presto.

I understand some people do need these software solutions, but a friend of mine works in IT at a local school, without his knowledge they purchased some software for £80'000 (yes really), software which was nothing more than a fluffy interface for standard windows features.
The moral of that story is that most of the time you don't need fluffy interfaces, you just need to learn how to properly use what you already have.