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Comment by mberning | Hacker News Reader

I am still looking for a simple tool to deduplicate, organize, and tag all the photos I have accumulated over the years. Old laptop hard drives, old cell phones, iPhoto libraries, aperture libraries, etc. I want to dump them into a staging area, remove all dupes, and start organizing and tagging them into a folder structure.

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I'm writing PhotoStructure to do exactly this task!

My to-do list is still long, but I'm plugging through it and I believe PhotoStructure already has the most robust tag extraction, inference, and image deduplication heuristics around, and has a novel browsing approach that scales well to very large (100k+ - 1mm+) libraries.

https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/

(Disclaimers: I'm the solo author, and although I am an open source author, PhotoStructure is commercial software. There are both a free and paid tiers of functionality: details are on the pricing page.)

I use regularly Shotwell to import from my camera and cellphones, and Geeqie works quite well in finding (also not exact) duplicates.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell (it doesn't require Gnome, my desktop is XFCE)

https://www.geeqie.org/

Have you looked at DigiKam? It offers directories, tagging (with custom tag hierarchies), deduplication and also face recognition. I think it can do quite a bit more, but I'm not a heavy user, at all. I just use it for keeping track of my modest library and it works great for that.

I will check it out

Another (paid) solution is Imageranger.com (don't have anything to do with them, but installed it for my father). I really like the import function that gets rid of duplicates (dedupes) and that put files into directories (video, photos, etc) and year/months based on how you have set up the import function.

The image viewing interface itself is okay although it might not be as smooth as e.g. Apple Photo (which I feel has its own challenges with how convoluted its image directories are e.g). ImageRanger has also tags and Face Detection and Recognition.

I have only installed the Home edition, and it seems to re-index the images to create thumbnails (relatively fast) if you have stored images on an external disk that is detached/attached between openings of the program. From what I understand, the Professional version does not have this issue as the images are cached (not tested out this myself). I don't think the face Detection and Recognition is on par with e.g. Apple Photo, but haven't tested it extensively enough to say that with 100% certainty.

What I like most about ImageRanger is its import functions and the way it stores the images in common folders and subfolders based on preferences and not in a convoluted DB.

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