Is this a good idea for sorting your photos? | Hacker News Reader

Is this a good idea for sorting your photos?

3 pointsvamonos3 comments

Know How podcast Episode 35 has some good tips on organizing your photo collection. http://twit.tv/show/know-how/35

My problem was that I had EVERY photo I'd ever taken over the last 12 years! I've never deleted anything - or looked at them. I've backed them up on to 8 BluRay Discs so far.

So I needed a way to shrink my collection to a manageble, share-worthy collection. This isn't a one day job, more like something thats going to take months - so I wrote a program that would index my collection, identify duplicates, and let me step through the unique photos one at a time and tag the good ones - then I can export to a date based folder structure.

Now my collection is a more reasonable size, and structured well on the disk - I'm exporting it as I go, and loading it up in Picasa and sharing on Google+. BTW, if I exit the app, when I reopen it I can continue from where I left off.

I've got over 50000 photos, turns out nearly half are duplicates, but I'm over 20% of the way through my collection and my family are finally getting to see the photos!

See http://photo-sorter.appspot.com/

But so far, no-one has given me any feedback - not a single one - so I don't know if anyone other than me actually thinks this is a worthwhile idea or if no-one has found it yet! Any thoughts?

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<aside>Picasa (the desktop client) already does this (and quite well, at that)</aside>

Not sure that that error means - is this from http://photo-sorter.appspot.com ? Try removing anything after the .com

And how does Picasa 'do this'? The issue with all of the photo managers out there is this: How to I go through my photos and tag the good ones as 'good', and tag the bad ones as 'bad' and if I quit and resume, how do I continue with the untagged (or continue from where I left off - considering that this may take weeks or months).

PhotoSorter isn't about eliminating duplicates or managing your photos - its about reducing an unsorted collection to a manageable and shareworthy collection.

Consider this - I've got over 25000 unique photos, never really been looked at or sorted. Nothing ever deleted.

I could use Picasa to go through them individually and tag/upload/share the good ones, but I'd have to remember where I was up to.

I could set up tags Good & Bad and tag them all like that and if Picasa could show me all the untagged photos that would help (help me continue from where I left off).

What PhotoSorter does is simply this - step through each photo one at a time and flag it as a keeper or not.

You can exit and resume from where you left off at any time, and export the flagged photos at any time.

So I'm using it as a convenient way to reduce my crazy photo collection to one that is worthy of loading in Picasa and manage/share there.

Right now I'm exporting what I've tagged every week (exported to yyyy-MM folders). Then, Picasa is configured to include that export directory, and those yyyy-MM directories are set in Picasa to sync to Google+.

For the first time ever, my family overseas gets to see my photo collection - without the crap. And, although I will still back up the entire collection (all 50k photos incl duplicates) my exported (good) photos will be much smaller and easier to back up (I have several backups, disk, bluray, online, offsite).

Also, because the collection in Picasa is only the good ones, I am quite happy to set it off in slideshow mode, and know I'll enjoy it.

I'm struggling with my photos as well. iPhoto stinks. Never tried Picasa yet though. I should probably give it a shot.

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