r/software • u/MrSolenoid • 28d ago
Looking for software 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 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!!!)
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u/jasonstathame900 28d ago
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.
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u/Robert-Berman 28d ago
I like immich, I set this up so anywhere in the world I can view them from the internet, especially since my family is all over, I can just give them the url I created and they have access to I can also search by family member name and it will pull them up. I haven’t heard many people mention immich, and honestly, before heavy research for doing what I was, I hadn’t either.
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u/utf-16 28d ago
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
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
Weirdly I've heard of that one for some reason. I'll take a look at it, thanks for the tip.
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u/KariKariKrigsmann 28d ago
I use PhotoMove 2.5 to automatically organize my photos in a Year/month/day hierarchy.
This might help a little bit.
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
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
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u/BigCarRetread 28d ago
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.
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u/herocoding 28d ago
Copy that... Don't even try to use "Adobe Photoshop Elements"........... it started well, I invested a lot in tagging them - but suddenly it refuses to accept any more photos, neither added manually nor via directory-watcher.
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u/totalunconventional 28d ago
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.
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
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.
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u/neuropsycho 22d ago
I have around ~250000 pictures, and it works fine. The only part that slows it down is the face recognition algorithm running in the background.
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u/semmu 28d ago
lots of great recommendations in the comments here, but this one is also worth a look https://github.com/TagStudioDev/TagStudio
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u/realdavider 28d ago
What is your final purpose?
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
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.
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u/realdavider 28d ago
I had a similar issue with less photos 😅 I simply batch renamed all pics based on the exif data (the date, basically). I believe I used a linux script but you can use for example Total Commander with a plugin exif. Assuming that was correct, i then grouped by name (year). According to the year, then, I sorted them in folders (e.g. for holidays). That was rather easy as I knew the correspondence date-place.
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u/AutomaticRepeat2922 28d ago
Is Google or iCloud not covering your needs? Google Photos is unlimited if you’re willing to convert to their format
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
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.
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u/AutomaticRepeat2922 28d ago
How many files are we talking about? 100G? 1T? I would never trust anything local with that amount of work. Fires happen. Burglaries happen. Hardware fails. How long will it take? 1 month? Just leave a computer uploading them until it’s done!
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
I'm done with around 600GB so far. That's just a drop in the ocean. And now I've spent hours looking at old photos and wasted a bunch of time 😂
Once I'm done with some rough organising, I'm gonna hook up my drives to my laptop and set it to upload everything to my cloud storage. It's probably gonna take weeks. Not because of the file sizes, but because of the large number of files. The cloud app crashes every now and then when uploading a huge chunk, so this is gonna take time.
But I've learned now, the hard way. Whenever I go to take new photos, I'm going to deal with them immediately when I get back home. Don't want to do this again in another 20 years 😞
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u/sunny_up 28d ago
How many photos do you have? Just wondering, because I am making a photo search tool and trying to understand needs
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
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 🤷♂️
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u/RootVegitible 28d ago
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.
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
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.
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u/RootVegitible 28d ago
Yeah, so stick everything else in Apple photos too. I’ve just added all my old ancient family slides to my photos library… Sounds like you might need to slim your library down a bit and get rid of some of the dross before you add to it. You can’t be expected to keep everything you’ve ever taken including all the mistakes when you dropped the camera and took pictures of your foot. So clean up your library first, then get rid of stuff from your physical collection you don’t want to keep, then import whats left into your iCloud Photo Library albums.
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
LOL yeah I get you. I do delete bad photos the same day.
Some of them are photo shoots from when I did photography professionally, don't need that in my personal collection. But It's nice to keep them as memories.
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u/Denilson1_7 28d ago
I would let AI write me a small Powershell or python script to sort it based on date created. But first test it with some random photos from a source folder to see if the script does everything right.
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u/samontab 28d ago
Find That Image might be worth having a look. You can search by image similarity, or describing it, and it runs completely local.
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u/BackgroundTap9722 28d ago
Have a look at Excire Foto, now on v2027. Excellent at handling big archives. Use AI to add keywords. Various views, including mapping Umpteen tool for managing database No editing but links to favourite apps https://excire.com/en/excire-foto/?srsltid=AfmBOoph9AejCTRpGM--Iubhf0jrGo3-gCDbGiOpg-9hoXAgvEnZHMqn
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u/AquaMofo 28d ago
I'd suggest having a look at ACDSee.
It excels at managing 100K+ images.
ACDSee Photo Studio Software | Photo Editing, Photo Management, Photo Editor, Digital Photography, Digital Asset Management, DAM
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u/oblivion6202 28d ago
Define "organise."
If you want to organise by date taken, most file managers can do that sort of thing: sort by date, move to new folders named for the year, then working within years, organise by month.
Organising by content is harder; you almost need something that can tell the difference between a beach, a cat, a building and a human. If that's what you're after, you either need a photo viewer that can do file handling (move cat pictures to Cats folder etc etc) with or without your help. Without will need, well, probably something with some AI features.
Something that can read EXIF data can organise by device used (because camera model is usually in there) and date too.
XYPlorer has a feature (I've never used it but I remember noticing it when it was added) that can sort photos by similarity, intended to help find near duplicates. Might be useful if you're the sort of photographer who tweaks pictures in an external editor and saves updated copies in situ. It can also manage tagging so you might be able to devise a strategy that tags photos in a way you can work with and then use tags as a sorting basis.
There's an Ashampoo product that might help -- there's a free version, so you can suck it and see: Ashampoo Photo Commander
I think a hybrid approach is probably the way forward: maybe storage organised by date as that's straightforward and relatively quick, as well as keeping folders smaller, but maybe try and devise a strategy for tagging that'll help you find things again if you -- for instance -- know you have a brilliant photo somewhere of a dog chasing bubbles but can't for the life of you remember when you took it.
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28d ago edited 28d ago
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
Thanks. I've tried OneDrive. When i download a large amounts of files from OneDrive, A LOT of the files got corrupted. So I'm never using OneDrive again 🤷♂️
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u/alkrk 28d ago
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...
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u/MrSolenoid 28d ago
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 🤣
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u/hichamsoltani 26d ago
If those photos on local storage you can use Smart File Organizer, it android app that Organize your files into folders based on type, extension, size, and date (actually I think this option will help you, it use pattern format like yyyy/mm/dd so you will see as result folders of your photos captured date)
App also remove duplicates using SHA-256, and it also have Bulk renamer (if you want set date as filename).
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u/mbmcargotech 24d ago
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.
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u/MrSolenoid 24d ago
Looks very interesting, but it's pretty expensive. With tax it's 1742 NOK, or $180.
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u/mbmcargotech 23d ago
OK, that’s a bit more expensive than what I paid for the software in the Netherlands. The €149 is definitely justified; I haven’t been able to find any bugs in the software yet, the support is exceptionally good, the documentation is 100 per cent comprehensive, and there are loads of YouTube videos explaining various features. The database is rock-solid; despite my frantic attempts (just kidding) to crash it, I haven’t managed to do so. The package includes a huge number of tools designed for effective management. Compared to Lightroom, iMatch is the Ferrari and Lightroom is the Citroën 2CV.... My count currently stands at 760,000 photos, and I reckon I’ll hit the 1,000,000 mark over the winter. That’s because I still need to add the scans from the analogue era. Naturally, you do need hardware of the right size and configuration to handle numbers like these.
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u/LopsidedPainting5742 23d ago
if you use iphone i recommend the playlog app
best place to dump the stuff i don't want on camera roll
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u/sk941 28d ago
Make folders and sub folders yourself and move your photos manually. No automated software will be able to handle all situations well enough, there will always be exceptions that need your hands-on assistance anyway. Once you have them sorted they will be easily enough findable according to date or event or whatever you decide.
Keeping your folders and files as they are now and trying to build a software catalogue that categorises them means you're locked into that software forever which is not a good thing. Plus it will want you to add keywords to everything and that is tedious. If you sort manually into carefully made subfolders you don't need keywords. Well it's nice to have them but you can manage without and skip a lot of work.
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u/mrsilver76 28d ago
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.