Over 50,000 images... help?

[ryanragona]

This is only indirectly related to my webpage that is hosted here, but here goes: I have over 50,000 images that I need to catalog, and some of them are duplicates that have been created during the prepress packaging process. I need a way to organize those images alphabetically in 26 folders (#-A-Z), and eliminate the older of any duplicate images... Any bright ideas?

Thanks so much.

-Ryan

[linnetwoods]

There is software (including freeware) that finds all your duplicates and shows them with their details, including creation dates but I can't remember the name of the one I used - it was too many years ago - try putting 'find duplicate files freeware' in Google.

Here's how I would tackle your task:

1) Go to My Documents (assuming you are working in Windows) and put the entire contents of My Documents in a folder created for temporary use, called 'Everything' or whatever, to get it out of the way.

2)Create 26 new folders named A, B and so on.

3) Send all the images to My Documents from all the places they are currently residing by selecting them and using the right click menu - Send to>My Documents - and, when they are all gathered, select all the ones that start in A and cut and paste into the A folder and so on. To select a bunch from a list, click on the first one and press the Index key (the one that lets you type A or a) and keep that pressed down while you use the mouse to add more files to your selection. Once they are all selected release the key and cut and paste them.

You may find this easier to do in Explore mode, so that your 26 folders are in the left pane and your photos are in the right pane.

[IanS]

...and press the Index key (the one that lets you type A or a) Commonly called the Shift key :)

[ryanragona]

The problem is that they're flung all over the place, and there are a LOT of them. Also, the Quark and Indesign files need to not be mixed with the images. :(

[IanS]

Try this program: http://noclone.net/?OVRAW=find%20duplicates&OVKEY=find%20duplicate&OVMTC=standard

It has a 30 day trial, with a limit of 30 files per move/delete as part of the trial - it is only limited (apparently) by the amount of RAM in the machine.

[Arria]

You could try this... it has a 'dupe detective' feature that allows you to set the % of similarity as well.

http://www.djuga.net/retriever.html