Help Sorting Images!

Rusk

Rusk

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Name
Russell Hill
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi all,

wow it has been a long, long time since I last logged into this forum and glad to see my account is still active :)

So I have been off my photography for a long time but decided I need to get back to it. I found my external HDD which I had stored all my images on from past few years and to my horror it came up empty :eek::(! I used some recovery software and thankfully I have all my images back but they all have a serialised number as a file name and are sorted in folders but with no system to which folder they are in. This means that I have 80 odd Gig of images in a random order with no meaningful file names to be able to sort them myself.

Does anyone know of a good software that can sort images based on meta data or something similar so that I can sort these images back into some form of order? Free software would be lovely but I would be happy to pay a reasonable amount to find something to auto sort based on a set of criteria.

I am hoping the meta data is intact but I think is is a bit messed up as the date created for all images is the same day I recovered everything but the modified date seems to add up to when the image was actually taken which is odd but hopefully I can use the modified date.

Thanks in advance,
Russell
 
:help: any help would be massively appreciated. Perhaps there is a better section of the forum for this request?
 
Using Windows? Yes you can choose to list files in date order. 'Sort by / date modified'.
 
droj said:
Using Windows? Yes you can choose to list files in date order. 'Sort by / date modified'.
Click to expand...

This wouldn't work as the modified date would be the date the files were recovered rather than originally saved.

How exactly do you want the files sorting as you wont be able to sort them based on what the image looks like sadly

Other than the file names are there any unique data in the file properties (Right click)? I am expecting them to be the same but never know.
 
Not really sure how I want them sorted but even a date order would help! Windows won't help as all dates are from the recovery BUT if you look at the meta data of the images the modified date some how seems to reflect the correct date the image was taken. As I said above all images have been renamed and then saved into a series of folder as part of the recovery software process. I have attached two images to show this.

Normally I will have them nicely sorted on Windows into event folders so I know where to find them. I might further sort into edited and unedited or good and bad or things like that but at the moment date folders would suffice. I would like to avoid opening every file to work out what it is, is it worth keeping and then moving it into a new folder. If I must then I will but will take some serious time to do so.
 
Hi mate. I cant spot any order in the numbers there sadly. Open up the lower file numbers, are they the newer or older pics maybe? I was thinking i could write somthing to do it but with no refrence to the dates within the file names or properties then theres nothing in vb I can do.

I will have a think n look tomorrow if theres a vb libary or plugin that will read the metadata off the file with out opening the image. If we have to open the image then the process of sorting it into folders with week numbers (eg 201301 for week 1 in jan 2013) would take forever to run.

Stupid question. Can you open the whole lot in bridge or lightroom n sort via metadata?
 
pocquet said:
This wouldn't work as the modified date would be the date the files were recovered rather than originally saved.
Click to expand...
I spoke too hastily w/o paying proper attention to the topic ...
 
Digikam can sort big collections by date or any other meta data. And it's free. So you can give it a try. Date sorting is easy with the calendar view and Timeline feature giving an overview of what was taken when. I manage my photo collection with Digikam.
 
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There's a really handy FREE Windows program called Bulk Rename Utility. It's very flexible and powerful and can work on any type of files, but for image files it has the ability to dig certain information out of the image's meta data and put it in the filename. So for example you could put the capture date/time in the filename: instead of IMG_1234.JPG you could have something like 2010-03-19_14:22:39_IMG_1234.JPG. That might help you get organised a bit more quickly because it will make it very easy to put images into sequence order.
 
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Good point about renaming. I just discovered that the flexible Digikam photo manager can batch rename pictures using anything in the metadata.

4146708399_5856df3bf0.jpg
<-Rename GUI with a preview of the old->new names
 
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