Symbolic links or Hard Links?

[Mac the Knife]

I have a enormous stack of images (>20000) that I use for presentations and so on.

I've organised them into categories so I can (relatively) easily find the image that I want.

Obvious each category has duplicates from other categories so that makes for a lot of wasted space. Yes, I could search by EXIF and/or IPTC info. but that means that I'll still have to go and fill out the fields on almost half of them.....:\

I've got a couple of nice apps that find identical files and another that finds similar photos (sorry Mixture! Do come back!) and can remove a duplicate file and replace it it with a soft link or a hard link as you will.

Almost all the photo files are stored in "My Pictures" with a few directories added to the "My Pictures" library.

What should I do? Seems a waste of disk space (not that I'm short of it) to have several copies of some pictures - (some have been a bit Photoshopped/GIMPed and are nor quite the same).

Any advice Guys and Gals?

Thanks

Mac

[Ancient Observer]

When I last looked at this on my machine - about 75gb of photos, I tried one or two bits of software that were going to help me...........But I decided that life was for something else.
They are reasonably well filed, and I can normally find what I want. Normally.

So I stopped doing it. All I did in the end, once deletion therapy had me very bored, was to separate the ones I am unlikely to ever refer to in to a different file. So that "others" file is now 15gb, and the main one is 60.
Like you, I have a ton of unused storage.

[aerobelly]

Depends on what you want to happen when one gets deleted. If you want the other to survive use hard links, if you want the deletion to apply to both use soft links and delete the real one, although you'll be left with a link to something that no longer exists.

From the moniker I suppose you're using MacOS to which this applies, also Linux, BSD and the many (mainly big-iron) Unices. MS-Windows FAT and NTFS filesystems are largely outside my experience, but if they claim POSIX compliance they should behave the same way.

a'