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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

#21

Post by iaskwhy »

terra_t wrote: post #12
iaskwhy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How about a service where you can pay people to do it for you, maybe, say, 10 cents an image?

The immediate problem I see with it is how does that person know how to do it my way? At least when I look at some pictures from a trip I don't always choose the most obvious as my favorite, there's some emotional aspect to some picture that is much more powerful than just the quality of the picture itself.

That said, maybe I'm in the minority and it would actually work!

Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics

#22

Post by balu »

burgerbrain wrote: post #19
balu wrote: post #6

Nice 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. :-/

Storage is an issue, you don't even know if you want to keep these pictures, and you're storing them in RAW? Huhwha?

Sure I keep them in RAW - because storage is not an issue. Organization is though.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics

#23

Post by thelastnode »

The regular way to do this would be just trudging through them after grouping by date or something.

A cooler way (albeit significantly harder, at least until it's working) way to do this would be to consider it an AI classification problem... maybe with enough training (as you go, since you'll be organizing anyways), it can start to suggest categories, so you can just hit accept as you fly through your pictures!

Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics

#24

Post by lotides »

OS X users — Use MetaDataMover to move and rename automagically based on embedded metadata. I have folders for year, month and day. The file name includes the camera name (we have several) and a sequential #. We try to remove poor photos as soon as we download them. In 30 years you're not going to want to look through gigs of photos, you just want to see the best (and most memorable) ones.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics

#25

Post by woodall »

I do not use this personally, however, friend's of mine REALLY like organizing their photos on FaceBook. There they can tag photos, share photos, and even hide them.

My suggestion, upload them to FaceBook. Note: I am telling you something that I personally would do, but if you do not mind it then go ahead.

Use your friends as MechTurks; I mean who knows you best? FaceBook does have an album limit of 1000, but you can have unlimited albums[1]. Have your friends tag things, comment, and generally help you! After all that is said and done, spider your albums.

I do like the 'back upiness' to all of that, but I do not know if FaceBook preserves the originals. I do know that they store your photos for up too, if not more than, one year after the deletion date.

[1]http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/photos.up...

Re: Ask HN: Best way to auto-organize 16GB of pics

#26

Post by luckydude »

tl;dr: I version control mine so I have backups, can share them with my mother, and here are some scripts that will help you do part of that.

I wrote a script to extract the dates and rename each photo to the date:

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/jpg2date

and you use it like

jpg2date *.jpg | sh -x

Then, like other people, I organize them by YYYY/MM/photos.

I also version control them in BitKeeper which has a binary asset mode (BAM) that works really well for this sort of thing. It wraps the photos in a pretty decent CRC, can use hardlinks for checkout (I can checkout 60GB of photos in a second), and because it is a distributed SCM I can push them to my mom's place in Florida where I have her mac's screensaver pointed at them.

So California has to fall into the ocean and Florida needs to blow up before I lose my photos. And I take that part pretty seriously, losing the photos would suck. Not because they are great, just because they are the record of my family.

I also put the entire lot up on the web (well, less anything that would make our nazi police think it's kiddy porn, no shots of the kids playing in the bath, don't get me started on how retarded our society has become). That script is written in our little programming language, L, but you could translate it to perl easily:

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/photos/etc/igal-it.l

and it generates the layout here:

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/photos

I need to put some html in there so you don't have to manually move month to month but you get the idea.

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