this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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15 years of Iphone pics...big organizational problem (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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So I've had a few iphones over the years, sometimes done backups using itunes back in the day, but always manually just pulled photos off the phones and into backup drives. Now I use icloud but it's only got stuff going back maybe 6 years.

I ran a free software on one of my backup drives to find duplicates and there are many duplicates of the same photos. This should be easy enough to delete the duplicates, but there are other issues...

Iphones name photos like IMG_1234. So, if you have over 10,000 photos, you have duplicates of the same number. Or, if you got a new phone and the people at the apple store couldn't clone your old data onto your new phone and you had to start fresh, you also have duplicates. I don't even take a lot of photos, I'm not that type of person, I actually have to force myself to take more photos generally, but in some cases I have 3 different photos with the same name. The software that finds duplicates knows that they are different, which is good.

So I want to eliminate the duplicates, and get them into folders by year to manage the duplicate file names... but there is one more issue... when you grab iphone files manually, they aren't rotated properly. They might even be left-right mirror reversed in some cases.

The software I am using also won't like, take a single version of each duplicated file and put it in a new folder...I'd have to delete the duplicates and then go find every folder on the drive and manually combine them.

There has to be a better way. Honestly I could probably write a php script to do this, but it might backfire.

Surely someone on this sub has tackled this? TIA

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Strongly recommend using something like Advanced File Renamer, or Adobe Bridge for a project like this. What I did was batch rename all my photos to their respective dates/times so each filename is both unique and informative. It also makes it easy to restore your metadata in the future if it ever gets stripped during a file transfer or something; You’ll always know what date/time each photo was taken just by looking at the file name.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

This.

On Mac:

  1. Import using "Image Capture" - pro tip: DO NOT plug your iphone into usb on a dock. For some reason it always hangs or drops the upload. I plug direct into back of M1Mac. Import each device source to a separate folder
  2. I use Hazel to do renaming based on time/date/device
  3. Dump all together into same folder
  4. I use Gemini II to delete duplicates.
  5. Now you have all photos in one folder, named with useful date stamps, and device that was used to take them imprinted in the file names. If metadata was retained during your uploads you can resort the whole archive by date. Do your own file management.

Probably easier ways but this always works for me. Only big suck is the import.

EDIT: if you uncloud your photos and keep them hardcopy just always make sure to follow good backup policy!