Photo cataloguing and sorting software

[sorcerer]

Not sure this is the right area so mods please move if you feel it needs to be elsewhere.

A family member has a Windows 7 laptop that he wants to factory reset and then give it to the grandchild. Needless to say, he wants me to get all of his data off the drive and save it to an external drive. In return he's agreed to do the airport run for me when my wife and I go on holiday so I'm winning hands down with this one

The problem is that he has more than 30,000 photographs on this drive, a mixture of .jpg and .RAW files that he's taken over about 5 years.

My plan is to create a folder for each file type on the external drive so that all the .jpgs are in one place and all the .RAWs in another, then sort out and delete any duplicates, but I'm just not sure of the best way to accomplish this.

I suppose one way is just to search for *.jpg and copy to the external drive and then do the same for the .RAWs, but I was wondering if any of you have experience of and could recommend, any free software that's capable of doing this?

I don't need anything like, say, Adobe Photoshop, because I don't actually want to work with or manipulate the images, just copy and/or move and maybe sort by date.

Cheers.

 

[Moltuae]

Why do you need to sort them? I would just copy them 'as is' and leave any sorting to him so that he can sort them however he likes (assuming he wants them sorted).

 

[Romaniac]

Wait a sec.... how are they organized now? Isn't that how he'd want them anyway?

If he wants formats separated, then you can just sort by type and make two sub-folders in whatever folder you're in at the time...


Also, I hope he has a backup solution in place!!!

 

[sorcerer]

Why do you need to sort them? I would just copy them 'as is' and leave any sorting to him so that he can sort them however he likes (assuming he wants them sorted).

Good point, but that's part of the deal. At the moment they're all over the drive and not really sorted in any way. I need to weed out any duplicates and I'm just going to sort them by date - the rest is up to him.

 

[sorcerer]

Wait a sec.... how are they organized now? Isn't that how he'd want them anyway?

If he wants formats separated, then you can just sort by type and make two sub-folders in whatever folder you're in at the time...

See above.

 

[Larry Sabo]

AmoK EXIF Sorter and Visipics. Exif sorter program is in English so don't let the screenshots put you off.

 

[Markverhyden]

I would not sort by file type but date. People identify with dates not file extensions. Personally I'd hoover up everything by image file type, including other types. Drop them all in one folder. If you're inclined to do the sorting then I'd find groups of dates and folder them that way.

 

[sorcerer]

Thank you chaps

 

[Mick]

If you have it, I'd use FABs for the initial export, which will preserve the file/folder structure. Pity Picasa's not still around - he sounds like the sort of person who'd benefit from that.

 

[Porthos]

Pity Picasa's not still around

I still have a Picassa installer somewhere for clients who absoultly cant live without it.

 

[HFultzjr]

I loved Picassa. You can still get it from MajorGeeks, just hasn't been updated in a while. Should still work fine.
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/picasa_photo_organizer.html