Digital Photos Organized
Until yesterday, my collection of digital photos was a complete mess. We had pictures archived away in multiple tar files on multiple computers, and duplicates everywhere. It was hard to find a picture, and unless you really knew exactly what you were looking for and where it was, it was impossible. Yesterday, I googled for a good solution and I came upon This informative post about photo organization in linux. It was the perfect solution.
So I created a gallery folder and untarred all my archives into subfolders underneath it. Then fired up GQview and did a recursive checksum search on all the subfolders and weaned out all the duplicates. All I can say is “Wow”. I expected to spend hours comparing photos and trying to find duplcicate - GQview allowed me to do the job in minutes.
As the author of the above post had suggested, I decided to also use jbrout to do the tagging and organizing. The big sell on this was that tags are stored in the IPTC data of the jpg itself, instead of some file or database. Since the gallery will go on the fileserver and accessed from multiple machines or varying OS, this is a big win - I don’t have to retag everything on each PC I use to access the album.
Then I began the long process of tagging. I didn’t really put much thought into how to categorize things, but I think I managed it okay. I created a category for the major families - Haase, Dudugjian, Inoue - and categories for Friends, Pets, Locations, Activities, etc. Then I went through the 1623 remaining photos and added tags as necessary. It took me about a total of 4 hours to tag all those photos. Mostly because I hadn’t seen some of these photos in 4 or 5 years and paused to take a closer look at a lot of them.
All in all, I’m very satisfied with how everything ended up. And I can’t think of a better way to start a new year than to look back on the last 6.
Happy New Year!