Importing Photos from multiple locations without importing duplicates

rolldog

Newbie Location: Baton Rouge, LA Joined: Jun 21, 2015 14:59 Messages: 14 Offline

Solved by

May 13, 2017 20:08

I've been taking pictures and keeping photo albums since 2001, but I learned many years ago, whenever my network drive crashed, that I need to keep a much better backup system, which I do now. My problem is this, whenever my network drive crashed, I was able to salvage some pictures from the drive, some pictures I found on CDs (when those were used for backups), and then Seagate took apart my drive in a clean room and salvaged approx 99% of my photos and videos.

My problem is, since I tried salvaging as much as possible back then, I currently have about 300,000 photographs, and about 25% of them I may have 2, 3, or even 4 copies of the same photo. Organizing this manually has been very unproductive. Today, I was reading about importing photos into Photodirector and realized it has an option which could make this easier. When I want to import a folder, I'll select it and subfolders, which I want to import into my library, select Exclude Possible Duplicates, then select Make extra copy into a new directory. I was hoping this would help resolve my problem with all the junk files.

I tried it on a folder that only has 193,969 Files and 4,631 Folders, which in total is 365GB. After it ran, the new folder had 20,760 Files, 916 Folders and is 73GB, so obviously this isn't working how I anticipated. I know a lot of the folders are accurate because I've setup directories for every year, a directory for each month inside of each of those, then folders from specific days that month which have all the pictures in them. I know I have some duplicates, but I don't think it's this many, just from the small portion I chose.

Does anyone have any suggestions or can let me know if I'm doing this right and if this will actually work? The bad thing is, when my network drive crashed, a lot of the metadata for a lot of pictures was lost. Most of the pictures still have a "date taken" listed. Will this idea I have work and actually help me filter through some of these pictures that are doing nothing but taking up extra space? I would love to get some input about this and if this is the best way to sort through these old pictures. Anyone have any suggestions? Please?

PIX

Senior Contributor Joined: Sep 21, 2011 00:02 Messages: 2910 Offline

May 15, 2017 14:03

Hello rolldog,

That's a complex set of circumstances you have there, and I'm not entirely sure that PhD (alone) can help you resolve all of them.

It appears you've made the right choices with "Exclude possible duplicates" & "Make extra copy" to get your photos organised.

When you imported your folder with the 4,631 sub-folders, which option did you select for organising photos?

Single folder?

By original folder structure?

By capture date?

Clearly, what you're doing isn't getting you closer to your goal yet. Any further information you can provide will help clarify the steps you're taking.

PIX PIX YouTube channel

rolldog

Newbie Location: Baton Rouge, LA Joined: Jun 21, 2015 14:59 Messages: 14 Offline

Jun 20, 2017 17:41

Quote Hello rolldog,

That's a complex set of circumstances you have there, and I'm not entirely sure that PhD (alone) can help you resolve all of them.

It appears you've made the right choices with "Exclude possible duplicates" & "Make extra copy" to get your photos organised.

When you imported your folder with the 4,631 sub-folders, which option did you select for organising photos?

Single folder?

By original folder structure?

By capture date?

Clearly, what you're doing isn't getting you closer to your goal yet. Any further information you can provide will help clarify the steps you're taking.

PIX

Sorry, I haven't checked back on this forum in a while, plus, I've been in Bora Bora the last 2 weeks.

What I'm doing is importing the photos from different directories where they are saved, including subfolders, excluding possible duplicates, make and extra copy in and set the destination (I'm doing this so I can have all my photos in one location instead of scattered around), and then I organize them by capture date so Photodirector will create multiple folders and separate all of them by the date they were all taken. It's taking a little bit of time, but eventually, I should have everything in much better order.

One more thing I'm hoping you can answer for me. I switched to Photodirector from Adobe Photoshop Elements, and one feature that was available in Photoshop Elements is it would import both photos and videos. Is there any way to set Photodirector to import videos as well? I don't intend to try playing the videos using Photodirector, but it makes it easier to import everything from a camera. After importing everything at once, I could move the video files into another directory under Videos. I noticed the Video-to-Photo button, but I figured it might be a way to capture a frame from a video. I haven't tried it yet.

Thanks!