Collating Archived Photos

[Wing Nut]

I've accummulated a few (5000 - 8000?) images over the years and also suffered the occasional PC collapse, but thanks to an adhoc backup system scattered across CDs, DVDs, external HDDs, a PC and a laptop, I think I have a near full set of original images. Come to think of it, it might be best described as a 'backup mess', but I have plans! :)

What I'd like to do is collate an alpha-numeric or chronological single image sequence, make a couple of full backups to DVDs and get rid of the previous mess out of the shoe boxes, HDDs, etc. I've tried the usual digital album software such as Picasa, but in my case they typically find numerous versions of the same folders/date-group full of identical images. Unfortunately they list them in a manner that's difficult to collate into a one-off image sequence - several repeats under the same 'March 2005' heading, say, but not all with a full set of March 2005 images. I was hoping there was a program like the old DOS Xtree Pro that could list files from across numerous pre-selected folders and partitions in one go and form a single apha/numeric/chrono list - I could spot and dump the repeats relatively easily.

Maybe I've overlooked this feature in one of the backup/album apps I've already tried. I just know that it would be a long job picking one example of each image out with the software I have tried. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

[Rebecca]

would something like this work?
Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder (http://www.mindgems.com/products/VS-Duplicate-Image-Finder/VSDIF-About.htm)
You can download a trial version to check it out.
I tried it a while ago but can't remember what I thought of it so not much help.

[Wing Nut]

Thanks for the suggestion. I had a look at the VSDIF and have tried a few similar programs (ImageDupless, PhotoSort, etc) in the past, but since my multiple collection run to several thousand images and with these sort of image matchers I still end up with the task of actually viewing them all and selecting all but one of each - preferably from the same folder/source. In my case it's more the way the file names are presented than the image itself. I've rarely changed the file names, so it's a searchable/sortable quality. Unfortunately windows search feature doesn't present the results in an easy to select manner. I keep coming back to the old DOS Xtree Pro program where I could add/remove files from a search result list simply by clicking on/off the folder (or 'directory' back then) they were in.

I've spotted an Xtree fan club (a vision of a bunch of bearded DOS freaks banging away on 66MHz XT PCs comes to mind!) on the net with some windows friendly Xtree look-alike software on offer. I might try it at the task.

[Graham]

If you're game, you can try using windows "search" function to scan your PC for all of those images, then you can sort the entire list by name and erase the ones you don't want.

This would be safest done if you could temporarily restore all your back ups to the one hard disk.

Or, my wife was doing digital scrapbooking a little while ago and had downloaded many gigabytes worth of image files, including many duplicates that she needed to sort out.

I wrote a tiny windows program for her to compare two separate directory trees and look for duplicate file names. It's not a very powerful tool, but you're welcome to it if you'd like to try it. From memory, it requires the .Net Framework 1.1 to run.

Cheers, Graham.

[Graham]

Oh yeah, it's quicker than using Windows search too.

[Wing Nut]

If you could pass that on to me somehow, Graham, it would be appreciated. I occasionally run .Net Framework, so that's not an issue. I've tried XtreeWin and it does indeed work just like the old DOS one, but I've encountered a filename problem. The old DOS-like list only shows the first few characters and the usual distinguishing letters/numbers are obscured by the next column so tagging the repeats across several directories isn't so easy ... yet.

I'm trying to figure out if I can set fewer wider columns, but I'm not hopeful.