I have 16+ gigs of pics that I have no easy way to organize. What methods/applications do you use to organize all your pictures?
Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
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Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
#2I have 25gb pics without video, storing in folders by year-place or year-event, and having all that stream to picasa + google online storage (cheap, 5$ per year for 21GB).
This way you have all pictures online to annoy friends from any computer + picasa does the face detection, so you only have to add non-human tags for later searches (I'm usually lazy).
Anyway, picasa makes it easy to find a particular photo even if you don't have it tagged, works both on mac and pc, and also flawlessly works with online storage.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
#3it probably depends on what the pictures are of and what you need to use them for in the future.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
#4Write a short program to extract the meta data from your photos, organize them in clusters of dates and volia they are organized.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
#5Depending on why you need them organized, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to tag photos based on content might be a viable solution.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
#6Nice question. I got about 200GB all organized within iPhoto. Size comes from the pictures being mostly saved in RAW. Still, iPhoto becomes slow.
I moved the library to an external hd to have free space on my internal one.
I fear the day I got to dig through every picture I made and decide if it is worth keeping or not. :-/
Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
#7I always found Picasa's organization of photo's pretty useful.
It automatically categorizes the photo's by date, you can also set it up to do automatic/guided facial recognition.
Another nice feature is the integration with a lot of online services.
Demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYO2uhrIZJ4
Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
#8Hash them and store them in folders by the first few characters of the hash.
You said 'organized', but didn't say HOW.
If you don't tell us what kind of organization you're looking for, there can be no meaningful answers.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
#9I use Apple's Aperture. I have around 200GB of photos organized in there.
When I dump a flash card to the computer (using Aperture), I then remove the card, and delete it manually on the camera.
Then I go through a quick pass in aperture rating everything that is just a poor/duplicate shot as '-1', so that it can go into my deletion bin. Ones that are exceptional get marked to '1' at that point. Most don't get rated. This is a really quick pass.
Then I make a second pass where I can start making more decisions.
A third pass is generally required to figure out what is really decent, worth uploading/printing/retouching.
Fortunately, 16GB of photos isn't too much to organize. Around 450-500 images on my camera.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics
#10Nice question. I got about 200GB all organized within iPhoto. Size comes from the pictures being mostly saved in RAW. Still, iPhoto becomes slow. I moved the library to an external hd to have free space on my internal one. I fear the day I got to dig through every picture I made and decide if it is worth keeping or not. :-/
I'm thinking out loud here but I believe most people fear that day so I'm wondering whether a service which everyday would ask you to choose between a couple of pictures (say order 10 pictures), you would easily get at least 1000 pictures per years organized. Does it sound any good?