File Organization / Sorting Software

[ian.ict]

LTT Frens,

The Background: During my extended time at home during 2020, I've spent quite a bit of time going through old phones, computers, hard drives, random archive discs, etc and dumping them onto my new system with the intention of creating a coherent archive of my digital life of the past 20 odd years.

The Problem: The files have zero organization other than the source I pulled them from and any marginal organization in the source (ie College Laptop, iPhone 4s) There are also significant amounts of duplicate files from earlier transfers of pictures, multiple copies of documents, earlier simple backups etc.

The Goal: I'd like to create create a system to file, store, and manage this data without manually going into each file, culling duplicates, mis-identifying something as a duplicate (ie old cameras using the same filename for different pictures).

The Ask: Is there software out there to help with this process?  I know there's software that can do this for photos and that might be a good starting point but I don't want to be tied to any specific photo software.  I'd like something that scan the drive, flag potential duplicate files, and provide some kind of UI that I can move them from whatever current file mess to some new file structure that makes more sense and is intuitive and simple to continue maintaining.

[Radium_Angel]

36 minutes ago, ian.ict said:

Is there software out there to help with this process?

None that I have found. Software cannot read your mind about how you want stuff stored, and if identical named things are indeed identical.

I've faced the same issues you are going through and searched for the same magical mythical software. Ultimately, I had to do it by hand.

 

This software will find dups, but IME it's little better than doing it by hand

https://www.auslogics.com/en/software/duplicate-file-finder/?mode=desktop

 

[svmlegacy]

I've used DupeGuru in the past for this. It can fuzzily search images, and identify duplicate files.

[LogicalDrm]

For certain file types, mainly photos and music/audio files there are good tools. I can recommend digiKAM (images) and Foobar2k (audio).

 

For overall files, I have used FreeFileSync. Like the name says, its main purpose is to sync and backup folders. But as it compares file size and modification dates, its also good tool to eliminate full dublicates and then manally check those which might have same file size, but dates don't match etc. The way to use is to have one folder where you collect stuff and compare source folder to that. I used this method when I re-organized my backup folders.

 

There are other tools (aka thread made before with other suggestions), but like said, software can only do so much, and its mainly based on file size and modification dates.

[Nes8bit]

Ok,so for photos and images only.

 

Which program would you suggest? I would like it to search my entire system, I would also hook up multiple drives.

Preferably place them in a folder tree like

"Sorted Pictures"

----Jan 2000

----Feb 2000

----Mar 2000.............all the way to present day.

 

And remove duplicates or suggest which are duplicates and I can decide?

 

Or how did you perform your sorting?

 

Can it read the meta data in the photo or just the modified date?

 

--------------edit--------------

Some years ago I accidently deleted all our honeymoon traveling pictures when trying to organize manually some folders. There were wedding, Wedding, WEDDING, wedding photos, Photos wedding...etc multiple folders in my documents and on desktop. whoops! Was she angry... immediatly stopped using my pcwhen found out and luckily we were able to recover those files with someones help

[LogicalDrm]

22 hours ago, Nes8bit said:

Ok,so for photos and images only.

For one, don't hijack others threads. Thats not nice.

 

For two, I just told photo organization software. Which is free and open source, which means it has learning curve. But also has very good documentation. DigiKAM. If you want paid options, Zoner Photo Studio is also something I've used for a while. Or if you have Adobe suite, Lightroom.

[Nes8bit]

Sorry, I did not mean to. I thought it better to ask here than make brand new thread since the topic is close.

I know next time to make a new.

 

Yes, I think digiKam I will give a try and see how it goes.

 

Thank you!