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I need to sort 10 years of badly sorted digital photos.
1. First I need to gather them into one place. (Various hard drives / lap tops / folders / CD)
SO I need software that will hunt out photos and retrieve them.
2. Then I need to sort them into a reasonable folder structure
SO I need software that will sort and structure in folders by date say to give some sense of order (like iTunes will sort your music out)
3. Then I need to de-duplicate (guilty of multiple backups / imports)
SO I need software that will de-dupe
4. Then I need to rename / tag and Generally sort into meaningful folders (Holiday 2002 / Ian & Sams Wedding / Etc )
Does this exist?
Picasa
Not sure it will do all of that, but +1 for Picasa...
Give Picasa a whirl. The way it will hunt out - and continue to hunt out - pics is great, it's a doddle to use, the facial recognition is better than anyone else's, it has easy peasy sync to web albums, sorting and tagging are all there and it's free. The only thing I'm not sure about is the de-duping
Did I say it was free?
Picasa will hunt but not move unless I'm missing something.
I need it to find and fetch
I f(*king hate Picasa. If I could control how it sorted its dating then it might be just about usable.
Lightroom can do most of those things i think:
When importing, you can tell it to import where things are, [u]or copy to a new location.[/u] I think it can pick dates from the metadata, so assuming that's correct it will then order things in a series of directories e.g. 2001\2001-07-13\ etc...
I think if you just point it to a HD it will find all images within that (after a bit of rummaging, no doubt)
If it does get the metadata correctly (which it should unless you have images without any metadata), it will then spot it has two of holiday1.jpg taken at the same time on the same date and not import the duplicate (or it can, if you wanted to). If your images don't have metadata any software may struggle with the correct dating and duplicating business.
+1 to lightroom. Not a cheap option though if you don't need the uberpowerful raw editing side of it.