Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics

20 pointsphlux25 comments

I have 16+ gigs of pics that I have no easy way to organize. What methods/applications do you use to organize all your pictures?

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Hash them and store them in folders by the first few characters of the hash.

You said 'organized', but didn't say HOW.

If you don't tell us what kind of organization you're looking for, there can be no meaningful answers.

I use Apple's Aperture. I have around 200GB of photos organized in there.

When I dump a flash card to the computer (using Aperture), I then remove the card, and delete it manually on the camera.

Then I go through a quick pass in aperture rating everything that is just a poor/duplicate shot as '-1', so that it can go into my deletion bin. Ones that are exceptional get marked to '1' at that point. Most don't get rated. This is a really quick pass.

Then I make a second pass where I can start making more decisions.

A third pass is generally required to figure out what is really decent, worth uploading/printing/retouching.

Fortunately, 16GB of photos isn't too much to organize. Around 450-500 images on my camera.

"When I dump a flash card to the computer (using Aperture), I then remove the card, and delete it manually on the camera."

A safer way would be to keep at least two copies of your photos at all times. I delete mine from the card only after they are on my hard drive and backed up on an external drive.

Depending on why you need them organized, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to tag photos based on content might be a viable solution.

we store around 500gb of photos currently. They are stored with two classifications. Our photography studio and our family photos. Both are organized chronologically with a top level folder that is the year. Within that folder we have 1 through 12 for the months and then each month is divided up to events (and sometimes the specific date).

All of the photos are backed up daily to a 1TB RAID1 NAS and monthly to a single 1TB hard disk that rotates to my mother in laws house. My rule of thumb is three copies if you don't want to lose it.

It is important to keep in mind that 16+ gigs of photos is only going to grow over time. That is where we started too.

Here's what we do.

We have 120GB of photos from the last 4 years (when our first kid was born). They are in folders:

  - Year 
  - Month (starting with #, ie "5. May"
  - Outing (ie "Air & Space Museum")

Photos that are just around the house are in the root of the month folder.

This makes it easy to search for specific events and vacations (based on the descriptive "outing" folder name), but the weakness is that it's hard to find a particular 'round the house pic if we forget what month it was taken.

I always found Picasa's organization of photo's pretty useful.

It automatically categorizes the photo's by date, you can also set it up to do automatic/guided facial recognition.

Another nice feature is the integration with a lot of online services.

http://picasa.google.com/

Demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYO2uhrIZJ4

I use digikam on KDE (Kubuntu) and tag images - it, like most does geo tags and date ordering automatically (so you can search by calendar or using a map to locate where|when images were taken).

I've just checked and I have 8500 images which surprised me a little.

Picassa is really good - I tried to get it to tag my images with facial recognition data but I couldn't do it without switching over and I'm happy with digikam for now. I'm rather hoping this feature will appear (perhaps via GSoC; http://libface.sourceforge.net/file/Download.html) in the next year or so.

iPhoto does excellent facial recognition and works rather well on large volumes or images (based on my limited play with it of about an hour or so).

I do not use this personally, however, friend's of mine REALLY like organizing their photos on FaceBook. There they can tag photos, share photos, and even hide them.

My suggestion, upload them to FaceBook. Note: I am telling you something that I personally would do, but if you do not mind it then go ahead.

Use your friends as MechTurks; I mean who knows you best? FaceBook does have an album limit of 1000, but you can have unlimited albums[1]. Have your friends tag things, comment, and generally help you! After all that is said and done, spider your albums.

I do like the 'back upiness' to all of that, but I do not know if FaceBook preserves the originals. I do know that they store your photos for up too, if not more than, one year after the deletion date.

[1]http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/photos.up...

There's really no solid way to auto-organize photos besides the organizing a photo suite like Picasa will do based on album names and such.

You've just got to sit down and go through a couple hundred pics and sort them, call it a day, do another couple hundred pics tomorrow, ad nauseum until you're done. Then make sure to stay on top of organizing new photos as they come in.

The hidden benefit is you wind up looking at all your photos! That's what you have them for- to look at! And without motivation, the odds are slim you'll look at them all. (If you're a professional photographer and the photos are not of your life/family/friends but that of your clients, obviously just organize by client/job/)

P.S. there is ONE real sorting method- extract the metadata and divide into folders based on date. It's not very good, but it's the only one I know of you can automate.

I have 25gb pics without video, storing in folders by year-place or year-event, and having all that stream to picasa + google online storage (cheap, 5$ per year for 21GB).

This way you have all pictures online to annoy friends from any computer + picasa does the face detection, so you only have to add non-human tags for later searches (I'm usually lazy).

Anyway, picasa makes it easy to find a particular photo even if you don't have it tagged, works both on mac and pc, and also flawlessly works with online storage.

The regular way to do this would be just trudging through them after grouping by date or something.

A cooler way (albeit significantly harder, at least until it's working) way to do this would be to consider it an AI classification problem... maybe with enough training (as you go, since you'll be organizing anyways), it can start to suggest categories, so you can just hit accept as you fly through your pictures!

OS X users — Use MetaDataMover to move and rename automagically based on embedded metadata. I have folders for year, month and day. The file name includes the camera name (we have several) and a sequential #. We try to remove poor photos as soon as we download them. In 30 years you're not going to want to look through gigs of photos, you just want to see the best (and most memorable) ones.

tl;dr: I version control mine so I have backups, can share them with my mother, and here are some scripts that will help you do part of that.

I wrote a script to extract the dates and rename each photo to the date:

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/jpg2date

and you use it like

jpg2date *.jpg | sh -x

Then, like other people, I organize them by YYYY/MM/photos.

I also version control them in BitKeeper which has a binary asset mode (BAM) that works really well for this sort of thing. It wraps the photos in a pretty decent CRC, can use hardlinks for checkout (I can checkout 60GB of photos in a second), and because it is a distributed SCM I can push them to my mom's place in Florida where I have her mac's screensaver pointed at them.

So California has to fall into the ocean and Florida needs to blow up before I lose my photos. And I take that part pretty seriously, losing the photos would suck. Not because they are great, just because they are the record of my family.

I also put the entire lot up on the web (well, less anything that would make our nazi police think it's kiddy porn, no shots of the kids playing in the bath, don't get me started on how retarded our society has become). That script is written in our little programming language, L, but you could translate it to perl easily:

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/photos/etc/igal-it.l

and it generates the layout here:

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/photos

I need to put some html in there so you don't have to manually move month to month but you get the idea.

Write a short program to extract the meta data from your photos, organize them in clusters of dates and volia they are organized.

Nice question. I got about 200GB all organized within iPhoto. Size comes from the pictures being mostly saved in RAW. Still, iPhoto becomes slow. I moved the library to an external hd to have free space on my internal one.

I fear the day I got to dig through every picture I made and decide if it is worth keeping or not. :-/

I'm thinking out loud here but I believe most people fear that day so I'm wondering whether a service which everyday would ask you to choose between a couple of pictures (say order 10 pictures), you would easily get at least 1000 pictures per years organized. Does it sound any good?

How about a service where you can pay people to do it for you, maybe, say, 10 cents an image?

The immediate problem I see with it is how does that person know how to do it my way? At least when I look at some pictures from a trip I don't always choose the most obvious as my favorite, there's some emotional aspect to some picture that is much more powerful than just the quality of the picture itself.

That said, maybe I'm in the minority and it would actually work!

Have you tried moving from iPhoto to Aperture? At 200GB I think you've outgrown iPhoto's capabilities.

Storage is an issue, you don't even know if you want to keep these pictures, and you're storing them in RAW?

Huhwha?

Sure I keep them in RAW - because storage is not an issue. Organization is though.

I love iPhoto Library Manager (http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/). I doubt you'll find anything completely automatic... well other than wccrawford's hashing idea.

it probably depends on what the pictures are of and what you need to use them for in the future.

If what you want is to organize by date taken, have a look at this ruby script: http://al3xandr3.github.com/2008/11/25/ruby-foto-organizer.h...

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