It's about to get crazy over here! Can we just sit with the fact that I said "over 25,000 digital images"! I mean... seriously... self needs to learn how to EDIT! But it's true, there are over 25,000 images on my harddrive at this time. So something seriously needs to be done with them.
I have been trying to organize and reorganize and inevitably reorganize photos for what seems like years! Everytime I upload more, I get discouraged because they are photos from different days and I don't have the time to look through and rename everything and put them in a folder each. In addition my camera does this great thing, not, where it starts the images over at 1 every time. So if I try to save a photo in a folder that already has a 1.jpg in it I have to either rename it or replace it, or put it in a different folder. Which resulted in a ton of folders... such as "E", "E-2", "E-candid", "E-Candid 2013" and there was also the E inside of the E folder inside of the E folder... DUMB.
So I went on the hunt for something to help! And something I found! Enter the
Digital Image Mover. It's a java based application that moves and renames photos. There are a lot of ways you can organize with this tool. So I recommend reading the manual to see what works best for you. I am going to share what works best for me.
I had rejected the idea of organizing my photos by date until now. I also wanted them by event or person... but some photos don't have an event or person, and some have two or three, so I ended up with multiples in multiple folders- that I will have to go through another time and delete. But for now, we are organizing! The tool will also rename all of your photos, which I liked because I have too many IMG_001 and DSC_001- so it renames them by date, hour, minute and second taken.
Upon opening the tool you are supposed to choose your settings. Eventually you can select your SD card, and every time you open this tool, it will process from there. But I needed to organize photos that were already imported onto my drive- so I had to get a little creative.
First off- the source path. This is where you would usually select your SD or Camera card. I went and found the first folder of many that I wanted to reorganize. If you have folders inside of folders it will take a little longer. If you have a folder Vacations- and in the folder are 10 folders each labeled with different vacations and in those folders are all images... it will sort that. However if within any of those 10 folder you have additional folders, or if within the first Vacation folder you have the 10 folders and some random images, you will have to select each folder individually. But that's ok- because if you want the folder to specify and event, you can do that.
Target Path- just select where you want your photos saved, I selected my Picture folder on my hard drive.
Year, Month and Day- I left the Year and Month as default, however I removed the YEAR %Y from the Date field (because it's already there).
This is where I added an event if needed when loading individual photos (above I added Butterscotch Fudge and below PB Cup Cookies). You could also do this after you have loaded everything by date by just editing the folder name, but I figured I might as well do it now and not have to go back through everything again.
Everything else, in the options field- the second tab, I left the same as default. You can read the manual on other ways to use those functions.
So here is how it goes:
1. Open the DIM. In Settings, Select your folder to pull your photos from.
2. Select where you want them saved.
3. Enter a specific event or just leave it with the date field.
4. Save, OK
5. Select Process and watch the magic happen!
When it is done processing, you can click the Settings button again, select a different folder to organize, the choose whether or not you want an event name, and process. Repeat over and over... in my case over and over and over until all of your photos have been renamed, and reorganized by date and certain specific events.
When you are done, hours or maybe days later- you will have an organzied photo folder by year, month, date and event!
How do you organize all those photos!?
If you have questions, I can try and help, but can't guarantee anything.
Use this tool at your own risk, make sure you keep a backup of your
images. I am not responsible for lost images. I didn't have any issues with the tool while in use.
