Photo filing advice please
 

I have hundreds of photos on my HD. They automatically upload from my phone to Dropbox and every so often I dump them in my photo folder.

I now want to sort them into folders chronologically - March 2011 April 2012 etc.

Without having to manually check each one and cherry pick according to date taken, is there a script I could run or software available that could do this automatically for me?

Thanks

STOP !

See the light NOW ! Before your photo collection grows by hundreds or thousands more !

Get a decent photo management (or DAM ... Digital Asset Management) program. Now !

Lightroom,Media Pro, iPhoto,Aperture,acdsee,cumulus,extensis portfolio .... hell even Picassa.... any half decent program is better than just dumping photos in folders !

Not only will they let you filter and file by date, but you an also keyword and give ratings to your photo collection.

Believe me, once you've discovered it, you'll never go back ! And certainly don't waste your time with scripts unless you are an experienced coder, otherwise you'll have more bugs than Tracy Emin's bed !

Personally I'm a fan of Lightroom for photo management in non-team/non-company environments (not so much for editing where Photoshop rules the nest)....the Lightroom database functionality is some of the best I've seen (especially at that low price point). But pick whatever suits you, most of them offer free trials.

Of course, if organising by date is all you really want to do, then even Flickr will probably do that for you !

Perhaps Picasa will do the job for you?

Thanks for the pointers, will check them out!

Depends how far he wants to look ahead.

If he wants a short-term quick-fix resolution to the problem, then sure, Picassa (or Flickr or any other of the freebies).

If he wants a long-term solution that scales and with a range of functionality he can grow into ... something like Lightroom (or its competitors) are what he should be looking at.

Lightroom & Co. vs Picassa is chalk and cheese !

What you don't want to do is one day find yourself with 10000 or 100000 images in Picasa, a friend shows you what Lightroom (or a competitor) can do and you think "bugger, that looks good". The transition will be painful between DAM software will be painful, I can guarantee you that ! Even if they provide helpful migration tools... there will still be manual work involved.... and the more photos you accumulate, the more painful the transition will be. So choose wisely, take your time....

STOP indeed. Mixture, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a massive, long list of folders with dated files. Picasa will NOT sort your folders for you, and in fact encourages "just chuck 'em anywhere" and then put them into Picasa "albums". Nothing could be worse if/when you want to go to some other program (or indeed keep them backed up).

Amok EXIF Sorter is the killer photo sorter. It will sort any Jpegs by folder and then date-time the file name. I use it to download and sort pics from my phones, various cameras video and still, as well as to send the pics over to my other computers on the network. It's brilliant but simple.

THEN use Picasa-great for photo viewing and basic editing-to view your pics.

Strict folder/pic management is the only way to collect and look after lots of photos. I have 23k of pictures, growing at over 100/month, all arranged in neat, dated folders. With AMOK and Picasa, it is a cinch to manage.

PM me if you need some help with Amok. Oh and yes, it'll grab all your folders and resort all your pics into dated folders.

There is EVERYTHING wrong with "a massive long list of dated folders with dated files".

That approach is a naive and simplistic view of filing from the dark ages of computing. Modern computing and software implementations allow you to do so much more.

I've got thousands of images and I wouldn't dream of being without professional cataloguing software such as Lightroom. The speed at which I can narrow down images, and the number of factors I can use to narrow them down beats your "massive long list of dated folders with dated files" any day of the week !

You won't find a single professional photographer that uses "a massive long list of dated folders with dated files", so I don't see why semi-pros or amateurs should settle for anything other than well-built and robust cataloguing software either.

Tut tut, there are other ways than the Mixture way. Unless you can actually present some clear, logical arguments against a Pictures folder with dated subfolders, I suggest you accept that there is more than one way to skin a cat.

In any case, you're talking about something different. The pictures/files have to be somewhere. They may as well be in a logical place/order. Then you can muck around with them in Lightroom/Picasa to your heart's content.

I really cannot believe you are so hard-over on so many issues, Mixture.

Why replicate your work ? Lightroom will create dated folders and dated files on your hard drive for you during import, you can customise the naming convention to your hearts content !

Capn Bloggs, you're just being argumentative for argumentative sake, I think you know very well that the query and filtering functionality built into products such as Lightroom beats your simplistic filing system hands down any day !

All you are doing is backtracking by suddenly trying to say I'm talking about something different. You know full well that I'm not.

As if you need an example :

You sit infront of your collection of thousands of images sorted into your little dated folders. Let's say I ask you to find me your strongest images of, let's say landscape photographs. You are not allowed to use anything else other than your neatly organised filing system... no cheating by hopping into Picassa or Lightroom - because you would only be reinforcing my point about why you need software like that !

On Lightroom I would be done before you even started as I have a "smart collection folder" that automatically queries my database for landscape photographs ranked higher than 3 stars. All I would need to do is to click on that "smart folder" in the list to bring up the list of thumbnails and I would be done.

Then let's say I asked you to look for stuff based on a larger combination of more complex parameters (e.g. keywords, image EXIF metadata, time of day, location etc. etc. ).... you would be completely lost with your files and folders ! On the other hand, even if I didn't have a defined "smart folder", it would only take me a few seconds to get the results.

So as I said. There is a reason professionals use robust cataloguing software such as Lightroom and there is no reason amateurs or semi-pros should not do so either.

My dell has about sixty thousand photos on it. They are in folders which I created and labeled using software which came with the laptop. It is called Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

I am able to find any picture in the sixty thousand within a few seconds. The software which searches by name is very fast. If desired, the photos can be sorted alphabetically or chronologically, forward or backward.

It cost nothing and works perfectly for me.

What Mixture says, if you are going to have a lot of photos, Lightroom, (or equivalent), but Lightroom is one of the standards.
Do a search for tutorials on your program of choice and if you like the idea of Lightroom look for Julianne Kost's tutorials. They vary from basic to advanced. She is an Adobe staffer and is excellent as far as I am concerned.

In addition to organizing your files, Lightroom is also one of the best editing programs around.
I use Lightroom and CS6, (AKA Photoshop), I find that I can do the bulk of image editing in LR with trips to CS6 mainly for editing at the pixel level
or collages, layers etc. but LR does the bulk of my editing.

lightroom is technically not an editor. It is a digital darkroom.

I manage fine at the moment with folders names in the following way, YYMMDD but I'm looking at lightroom.

By using 140830 for today's pictures, it's easier to sort them than using the month in the folder name, because April will list before January.

I presume you are therefore too young to have photos taken before 01/01/2000? I use YYYY_MMDDxxxx, where xxxx is a serial for that day for "hobby" photos. I have separate databases where I log sightings / photos / flights etc have the details of photos from which I will inserting links following a forthcoming software upgrade (HandBase).

Indeed.

On its own, as cataloging software its pretty darn awesome.

I don't use it for absolutely all editing, but some of its features are truly fantastic, for example three editing features I use a lot are :

- Virtual Copies
- Sync Settings
- Camera Profiles

Just started going through my recently-departed Mum's computer, specifically her pictures. Whatever you use to catalogue/tag/edit your pics, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE name the folders and filenames with dates and times! eg Folders YYYYMMDD and files YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS. It'll save whoever inherits them a lot of work... :ok:

Does Lightroom work properly across a network?

I have all my photos on a central machine so that I can access them from any other machine around the house. Picasa only works naturally on a local machine so any albums or other grouping I do on one machine is not reflected on any other machine.

Actually I have found a hack that gets round this (allows each machine to see the same Picasa database), but it is too damn fragile! It corrupts if the connection to the central machine is lost for some reason.

Lightroom itself is not specifically designed be run over a network. Lightroom operates as an image catalogue that manages collections of images.

The problem therefore is not so much the location of the images. You can store the underlying images wherever you like ... SAN, NAS, local disk etc. That is not a problem. Lightroom doesn't care if the images are online, nearline or offline. Lightroom just stores a reference to the path.

The problem is the Lightroom catalogue. Its actually an SQLite database. The trouble with using databases over a network is that you can run into all sorts of weird and wonderful problems if you're not doing it right. Its one thing using a client/server database over the network (e.g. mysql, postgres etc.) . Its another thing using something like SQLite where you're manipulating the core database files themselves over the network.

Thus, my recommendation would be :
- Store your images on the network.
- Keep your Lightroom catalogue on your local computer.
- Configure the lightroom catalogue backup functions on your primary machine to backup the catalogue to the network storage.
- Pull/push catalogue from secondary machines as necessary

Or something along those lines. Basically keep the catalogue on the local machines. Use the network as centralised storage and as a means to replicate the catalogue, but don't manipulate the catalogue directly on the network.

Mixture will be chuckling: I've just found out Google is discontinuing support for Picasa. Google Photos is the replacement. Cloud storage? Of course!

Damn Google.

I'm hoping that you've misread something! Picasa used to let you save to web in what were called Picasa web albums - all very useful for sites such as this taht want you to publish online and link to in threads. Also good because there was a lot of free online storage to use across platforms, or to give links to people you wish to bore.

The latter bit is what they're renaming Google Photos. Not a lot more than a new name really.