0
\$\begingroup\$

Possible Duplicate:
What software is focused on reviewing and organizing images?

Each year I do a long trip in my holidays and take loads of pictures. And each year I have the same problem of effectifly organising my photos.

What I do right now is just put my photos on my HD in different folders (each folder for a location of my trip). But the problem is that my photos come from different devices, that is from my cellphone, my camera, my girlfriends cellphone and her camera. So that are four devices all with different pictures.

Is there a tool to easily organize the photos from the different devices and possibly rename them all to one format in a chronicle order? Or do I do everything manually?

Any suggestions are welcome. Kind regards, Floris

\$\endgroup\$
3
  • \$\begingroup\$ Is this question different than photo.stackexchange.com/questions/4212/… ? \$\endgroup\$
    – dpollitt
    Jul 23, 2012 at 16:24
  • \$\begingroup\$ @dpollitt oh I see, I'm sorry for double posting a question. The question is more or less the same, only he knew more than me to start with (I had no idea to use tags, never used them before). If possible the question can be deleted, my sincere apologies for the inconvenience. \$\endgroup\$ Jul 24, 2012 at 1:22
  • \$\begingroup\$ It's okay to ask if you can't find something else that answers the question — it's often the case that you need to know the answer already to find the duplicates. It's best to mark them as duplicates though so we don't have similar answers scattered all over. \$\endgroup\$
    – mattdm
    Jul 24, 2012 at 2:03

3 Answers 3

3
\$\begingroup\$

Lightroom is my tool of choice for this. If you do a search on 'manage' or digital manage, you will get scores of discussion on Photo.SE regarding this.

Of course, LR has the benefit of being a development tool and a management tool. For me the management tool has the added value of removing the file name and location from the equation. No longer do I need to consider the folder or file name as important to understanding the subject, or location. This is important because these can get lost or forgotten as you move disks, perform backups etc. Instead, with Lightroom, you tag images with metadata and location information, and you can put them in virtual collections that make it easy to understand and work with your images.

So rather than putting images in the 2012>Kids>Vacation>Grand_Canyon folder, you instead have images in the the 2012>06-12 folder. What they are named or what camera is unimportant here. In Lightroom, you can then add tags to each image, across all camera types, such as 'Grand Canyon', vacation, kids. You can put all the images, from all cameras in the 'Vacation' collection, making them easy to find and work with. This collection can be smart, and get created automatically from the 'vacation' tag. Furthermore, you can then ask Lightroom to filter only the images from the iPhone, so that you can process them differently than the RAW images from you dSLR.

I think you will agree that this provides far more capability than simply placing your images in folders.

\$\endgroup\$
1
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thank you for providing this answer, I think yours might be what I look for. I will test it out as soon as possible. \$\endgroup\$ Jul 23, 2012 at 15:38
3
\$\begingroup\$

You can do this simply with total commander. Just put all photos in one folder. Then sort them by date (click on header of Date column), or you can do it later in rename tool.

Now select all files and use Batch rename tool (menu Files -> Multi-Rename Tool ... Ctrl+M). You can write whatever name you want. For example: Ireland_[C], where [C] is counter. You can configure this counter in right side of window.

Under name configuration you can see Old and New names. You can also sort them here.

Here is an image of Rename tool:

rename_tool

\$\endgroup\$
2
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thank you for your answer. Your tool will come handy in the future. Oh, do you know what is wrong with my question and why it got downvoted? \$\endgroup\$ Jul 23, 2012 at 15:42
  • \$\begingroup\$ I have no idea. \$\endgroup\$
    – zacharmarz
    Jul 23, 2012 at 19:13
1
\$\begingroup\$

You can find solutions in a nice money-for-value package. In this case, instead of purchasing a $100 software you can try the free solution of Google Picasa. It provides same features and usability like other solutions: tags, tags as "virtual" albums, Geotagging shown in map, face recognition, batch editing-renaming and other goodies. My advice would be to try that one first because you have nothing to loose.

\$\endgroup\$
1
  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks for offering a free-software tool to use! I will try Picasa first. \$\endgroup\$ Jul 24, 2012 at 1:18

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.