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Ask HN: Recommendations for a Photo Management Tool?
Like probably most of us, I have accumulated gigabytes of digital photos over the last 20-odd years. Over the years I have occasionally tried to organise them into folders, either by subject matter, or by timestamps, or both -- but each time I have given up, and now I have a mess of folders, some photos being duplicated and scattered without any real order.
Can someone recommend a good software tool to automate the task of photo management? Ideally it would be able to dig through multiple levels of nested directories, recognise photographs and identify duplicates, and then automatically group them at the very list based on years/months, and possibly on geolocation (assuming it is stored in the metadata). A next level would be the ability to somehow label and/or group the photos by recognising certain items in them, although that would just be a nice extra.
A nice UI is a welcome bonus, but by no means a requirement. I would be happy if it worked on Linux, but Windows would also be fine, as long as the end result is a directory structure containing photos.
Any ideas?
- mceachen 7y agoI'm in exactly your situation (possibly worse), so I quit my office job to build PhotoStructure. https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/ https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/ I've been letting people use PhotoStructure for free during the beta in exchange for their feedback. Know that this next release will be the last beta release before general availability. There will be free and paid subscription tiers (with discounts given for feedback, and when your friends and family also become subscribers). If you sign up for the beta, I'll be sending out installation instructions when I release the next version, which I expect to be within the next week. Here's what's coming soon: https://photostructure.com/about/release-notes/ https://photostructure.com/about/release-notes/
- BerislavLopac 7y agoYes, I've seen and tried it, but it is not very user-friendly. The first time I installed it (on MacOS) I have told it to import all media, but this is not what I wanted; however I can't find a way to reset the preferences and define the import directories again. Each time it just informs me that it will update the libraries and gives me an option to quit but not to change. It's very frustrating for a piece of software that is supposed to be "simple to use".
- mceachen 7y agoPlease send me an email if you've got any issues: support@photostructure.com (this sort of feedback is exactly what I'm looking for from my beta users!) The system settings on Mac are here: https://photostructure.com/getting-started/advanced-settings/#system-settings https://photostructure.com/getting-started/advanced-settings... Shut down PhotoStructure, delete that directory, and if you want to reset your library, delete the `.photostructure` directory in your library (everything in there is reproduced during the import), and restart PhotoStructure to start from scratch.
- BerislavLopac 7y agoThank you, I figured it out now. I still think it would be useful to have an option to open the app without completing the indexing, or maybe having the indexing running in the background, or at the very least resetting the preferences at startup.
- mceachen 7y agoIndexing and version migrations happen in the background already, and progress is shown on the home page. You can pause indexing via the system tray menu, and there's an advanced system setting to prevent sync runs from starting at launch. Please email me if you have any other issues or feedback!
- BerislavLopac 7y agoWill do, thank you!