Organizing A LOT of photos
The day I have been avoiding for years have come. I've decided to try to get all my photos organized. I am a hobby photographer and have hundreds of thousands of photos on different drives. Some are from Google Photos, that I've downloaded, some are from…
The day I have been avoiding for years have come. I've decided to try to get all my photos organized. I am a hobby photographer and have hundreds of thousands of photos on different drives. Some are from Google Photos, that I've downloaded, some are from iCloud, some are from 20+ years ago taken with different cheap cameras. I'm looking for a program that can handle these amounts of files without crashing. I've tried a few free ones, but they all crash before I can even import a couple of % of my photos. Some photos aren't very important, but some are very important, like photos of my kids when they were young, and also of my parents and stuff like that. Yes I know, I'm a data horder. Just not a very organized one. But that's gotta change. If I'm looking for a particular photo, there's no way I can browse through them all. So PLEASE, does anyone know of a good software (NOT!!! ADOBE!!) that I can use to organize my photos preferably on an external drive or NAS? I'd prefer a free software if possible, but I'd gladly pay for one that works. (NOOOT ADOBE!!!)
Collected discussion
Weirdly I've heard of that one for some reason. I'll take a look at it, thanks for the tip.
To have an organized and searchable photo library. Now I have some photos for a whole year in a couple of random folders, some are organised by year-month. But it's a complete mess right now.
Many of the photos are taken with full frame cameras using Nikon raw format. Google photos is fine for the older JPGs, but I do want local copies. I'm using a Norwegian company that gives me unlimited cloud storage, but the problem is uploading that many files just doesn't work. I've asked if I can package them and unpackage them on the server, but that isn't an option. Uploading a few larger files would be a lot faster.
In total? I have no idea. Some folders have subfolders and can have 100 000+ files in them. I currently have 2x6TB SSDs in my main desktop, and several external 6TB hard drives. It's a freaking nightmare. I'm sitting here trying to organise things, but when I open a folder that contains hundreds of subfolders, it gets very overwhelming. Just moving those folders to different folders on the SSDs makes every program I tried freeze and eventually crash. digiKam looked promising, but that gave up to when trying to import a "small" folder 🤷♂️
I'm gonna give that a try. 👍🏻
I just tried the free version on a small folder with around 7000 files and it did it's thing. I'm gonna buy the pro version and try it on a bigger folder. Wish me luck LOL
I wrote a tool called GroupMachine that would help. It will group photos and videos into albums (folders) based on time and location changes. https://github.com/mrsilver76/groupmachine If you provide a (free) geonames database then it’ll rename the folder to the location too.
Interesting. I'll take a look at that tomorrow.
Yeah I know. I used Apple Photos for years. Currently have 311 439 files in my photos library there. But that's just a small part of my whole collection. And my goal is to store and organize everything locally.
Yeah below 100K photos it works fine ;) Try several hundred thousand. That's when the problems start. I have a very powerful computer, and even that starts to crawl when using digiKam with my library, if it even runs at all without just closing itself without warning.
That looks very interesting. Thanks for the tip 👍🏻
Yeah, but the problem is the amount of files I'm dealing with. Having thumbnails turned on is a big no no 😂.makes my pc go all crazy 🤣
Have a look at Directory Opus. Not free but you can integrate exiftool with it to correct dates in the meta data, rename images based on date taken, move them to a YYYY-MM type folder structure or similar etc. There's a pro photo organiser active on the forum who runs courses and recommends it to her clients
Use immich, its awesome :)
I use PhotoMove 2.5 to automatically organize my photos in a Year/month/day hierarchy. This might help a little bit.
I recently tried Digikam to handle and index my photo library of around 33k photos. It serves my needs, its fast and efficient and its free.
lots of great recommendations in the comments here, but this one is also worth a look https://github.com/TagStudioDev/TagStudio
If you are not looking to organise the actual files itself then Immich could help view photos in a timeline. https://github.com/immich-app/immich. It is like a self hosted google photos as far as I understand it It supports photos and videos. You can mount the existing folders as "external library " in it. It uses machine learning to detect faces(almost accurate) and group photos. You can also have your phone(Android or IOS) sync to the main server for daily photos/videos where you can have a centralised viewing experience. Though the media backed up/synced to immich have their folder structure decided by immich. I don't know the exact structure as I'm a new user myself but do look it up. Other than the external library it has a good back up system. This is a vague answer from a new user of immich. So look it up thoroughly before considering. Edit: It just had its v3 release.
What is your final purpose?
Is Google or iCloud not covering your needs? Google Photos is unlimited if you’re willing to convert to their format
How many photos do you have? Just wondering, because I am making a photo search tool and trying to understand needs
I have a big photo library managed in Apple Photos… Free with any Apple Mac purchase lol. On the mac make a smart album to show photos that are not in an album, then just make albums to move photos you want to keep in them. Then use the builtin face and pet detection to figure out what pictures of people and pets should go in which albums. Use the builtin duplicates finder.. plus delete anything blurry or low quality. Simples.
I thought you can organize and bundle them into folders by date etc. in Windows Folders. I think you have to set the folder as photo or something...
The answer to this question is simple: Photools Imatch. My collection consists of about 760,000 photos, all of which are fully tagged with keywords using AI. Coming from the Lightroom world, Imatch is a breath of fresh air as a management tool; performance is never an issue, and the tools it offers are unimaginable in Lightroom.
A few years ago I would say Picasa is an answer. You could still try it. But it may not handle the RAW formats etc.