Help with Picture Organizing

JH
Posted By
JJ_Hooker
Oct 16, 2007
Views
352
Replies
9
Status
Closed
I have 1000’s of pictures on a hard drive, and have 100 cd’s of pictures. Is there a program that will make it easy for me to check if the cd pictures are on the hard drive already?

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MD
Michael_D_Sullivan
Oct 16, 2007
How are they organized on the hard drive?
JH
JJ_Hooker
Oct 16, 2007
They are organized in multiple folders.
T
TLL
Oct 16, 2007
What I would do is use a product like Smart Sync to mirror your cd’s to the hard drive. You can make a batch command that would put anything in the DC drive on the hard disk using a keystroke. It might take awhile but there would be no doubt that the files would be there.

You can download a trial for 30 days – that should be enough time 🙂

Link:

<http://www.smsync.com/downloads/>

TLL
JH
JJ_Hooker
Oct 16, 2007
Will that program be able to tell if there is a file already in any folder, or would I still manually have to check?
T
TLL
Oct 16, 2007
I would think that if you were to move all your images that are already on you hard disk into one folder (relatively easy and fast), then point Smart Sync to that folder to compare, you will have what you’re looking for.

If the files are already there you can set it up to skip or over write them. After this initial run you can reorganize into whatever folders you want and then back the whole thing up to another disk or CD/DVDs…

TLL
JH
JJ_Hooker
Oct 16, 2007
Yea, I read that it can do that on the site, but I need something that is able to scan through multiple folders. as it takes way too long to put everything into one folder and back again. The whole folder is about 23GB.
C
chrisjbirchall
Oct 16, 2007
Have you thought about using Lightroom (30 trial available). Because all the metadata is stored in a database, it will warn you immediately if you try to import images which are already in the catalogue.
LS
Laverne_Stahl
Oct 17, 2007
You can try Reasonable NoCLone, It has some features you may find helpful and it is relatively inexpensive. I have been searching for a way to find all identical duplicates on several drives and allow me to set conditions on which ones to delete. NoCLone has a smart marker feature but I have not found a way to set priorities on which files to auto select. Going thru 12,000 unique files with up to 5 copies each is an arduous task, so I just hit the large files and keep multiples of most of the rest.
Drive space has gotten cheaper than my time.
There are programs that allow you to export a database of files but sorting the database and then and deleting the dupes takes forever.
If you attempt to copy all your files into one folder remove all the thumbnail files in all your folders first.
Have fun!
T
TLL
Oct 18, 2007
"I need something that is able to scan through multiple folders. as it takes way too long to put everything into one folder and back again. The whole folder is about 23GB."

If all this is on one drive, simply moving the files on the same drive to another common folder on the same drive should be near instantaneous. If all that 23GB of data is spread among a bunch of folders it could take some point, click and dragging to accomplish, but then you have one place to compare your CD images to.

This organization will take some time regardless (that’s why we avoid it) :), but once done an automated mirror drive works just great…

How to Improve Photoshop Performance

Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!

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