Monday, January 28, 2013

Sort out your digital photo collection

If you're like me, you've got several years (and gigs) of digital photos that you've been copying off your cameras, your phone, your wifes phone etc. Tonnes of photos, all unsorted, and some times copied more than once. How do you go about sorting out the good photos - the ones you want to share with your family - from the ones that just aren't worth sharing?
I had this problem - 10 years of photos I'd never looked at or sorted through. Sometimes I'd copied the same photos multiple times because I wasn't sure if I'd already got them. So I needed a convenient way of going through them - one by one, flagging the good ones, skipping the bad ones, eliminating the duplicates so I'd be able to export the ones I liked and share them with my family.
So, I've written a very simple application that only does one thing - sort the good from the bad. It does it like this:
  1. Import directories that contain your photos - these directories are recursively scanned and each photo is added to the database.
  2. Duplicate photos are identified so that you'll never see the same photo twice.
  3. Now, you can step through each photo one at a time - either adding the photo to your collection or skipping it.
  4. You can quit at any time, and come back and continue from where you left off later.
  5. If you copy more photos off a camera into one of the directories you imported, you can re-index the directories and they'll be added to the database.
  6. The original images are never altered or touched in any way.
  7. At any time, you can export the photos you've added to a directory - only files that don't exist will be exported so you can export to the same directory as you make progress through your collection
  8. Now you have a directory full of photos you like and want to share with your family or the world, or tinybeans, or facebook or picasa or flickr. Maybe you want to use those pictures as your screen saver - whatever, these are the photos you want to back up.
If you have the same problem as me, take a look and see if it helps you.

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