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How would you sort 20000 unrelated pictures?


Question

I've accrued around 20000 images of internet randomness, and their disparate file names have finally triggered my OCD. I'm at a complete loss at a practical structure and method for batch sorting and renaming them. My lazy inclination is to rename by creation date, but after meeting people who sort their porn by color and emotion (don't ask) and others with too much time sorting their image collection by subject (i.e. img \bears \ bear tongue \beartonguelong.jpg ), I feel like I should... do better.

If no exiting program can automate this, I think I'm going to have to write or try to convince my developer friend to write a script to determine the RGB value of each picture and rename them as RGB scales so I can search them by rough color ranges. i.e. R24G10B01.jpg for all images with R240-249, G100-109, B 10-19. Maybe too much work for something like this. Either way, I'm just polling to see if there's any organization structures for random pictures I'm not thinking of.

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Is there some sort of metadata available that would tell you where it was downloaded from?

I'm sure something like this exists somewhere, but I can't remember on which operating system and which details were available.

If that is the case, you would be able to arrange it to some degree based on where you got the image from.

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Obviously you need to put your vacation time in with work, then start looking at the photos one at a time, and moving them into catagories(such as funny, gross, sexy, etc), then naming them based on the catagory.

That or just delete them, because really, are you going to look at them again?

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Ask yourself if you really need them or are unnecessarily hoarding them.

The only way to sort them if you really need them is the painful way - sort by subject, manually.

If not select all and delete - probably what I would do - and problem solved.

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It's a good question; what do you even need them for?

If they're just sat there and you have no way of finding anything, surely you have no need for them?

Whenever I've downloaded images that I want to keep (mainly 'good' design and stuff) I've simply sorted them by the source and date. I've done it like this because I thought I'd actually go back to them at some point, and I do, and doing so is a pleasure :)

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20,000?

Do 100 a day, and 5 1/2 years from now you'll be done!

Seriously though, if I had that many pictures I would just accept the order that it was in rather than trying to change it.

Where did you learn to do maths lol

100 a day for 20k would be 200 days lol

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Just use something like Picasa, go through and batch tag all the important pictures. Like Holiday, Florida, Dog, Cat, Sister, Party etc. That way all the ones you will want to find can be done easily. I wouldn't worry about actual image path locations as images can be categorised many times. Like Funny, memes, rage.

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It's a good question; what do you even need them for?

If they're just sat there and you have no way of finding anything, surely you have no need for them?

Whenever I've downloaded images that I want to keep (mainly 'good' design and stuff) I've simply sorted them by the source and date. I've done it like this because I thought I'd actually go back to them at some point, and I do, and doing so is a pleasure :)

They're 80% design or photography stuff from various genres and the rest probably an assortment of cats and gifs. The images are saved automatically from starred google reader items using IFTTT with site title in the file name, but that's pretty redundant with reverse image search which is why I think sorting by color would do the trick. I go through them pretty often too, maybe I have to con some interns into sorting them, but there's way too much questionable stuff mixed in.

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