Consolidating pictures into one catalogue

[Kerm]

Hey, I am looking to consolidate all my images from multiple internal and external drives and into a single catalogue.

I have thousands of RAW's dotted in various places and I have more than one copy of most of the files.

I'm looking to have folder containing one of everything, so I can easily back it up and keep things more organised.

Can I use Lightroom for this? Any other suggestions?

Cheers.

[crazzy88ss]

That sounds really complicated, especially when you throw in multiple copies... You might have to do it manually.

[Argote]

Lightroom does detect when something is on RAW+JPG as a single image, you could use the import function in Lightroom and have it move over the files. I do recommend some sort of subdirectory structure rather than just lumping all files ina single folder though. Luckily, Lightroom does this for you.

[richardsim7]

Sorry, when I read the title I thought "consolidate all your debts into one easy monthly payment" :laugh:

[Kerm]

Sorry, when I read the title I thought "consolidate all your debts into one easy monthly payment" :laugh:

They both do contain the word 'consolidate' yes......

[saxondale.]

I know Aperture can consolidate multiple libraries; i did it when i had one library on my mac and the other on an external hdd: http://www.apple.com/aperture/how-to/#video-merginglibraries

I'm afraid i don't really know Lightroom.

[spikey_richie]

http://picasa.google.com/

[Kerm]

Ok, still battling with this one.

I have a new question, if I chuck every pic I have into one huge folder, bearing in mind the camera names the pictures 0001 upto 9999 then restarts, so I will have multiple pictures with the same name, e.g. IMG_1234(2), am I going to run into problems when adding new pics? Aslong as all of the images are different sizes they won't be considered duplicates will they?

I'm going to be using Lightroom so access to the pics won't be a problem, i'll just sort them in LR by date taken.

[remus_lupin]

Ok, still battling with this one.

I have a new question, if I chuck every pic I have into one huge folder, bearing in mind the camera names the pictures 0001 upto 9999 then restarts, so I will have multiple pictures with the same name, e.g. IMG_1234(2), am I going to run into problems when adding new pics? Aslong as all of the images are different sizes they won't be considered duplicates will they?

I'm going to be using Lightroom so access to the pics won't be a problem, i'll just sort them in LR by date taken.

Well if your going to do that... Why don't you just:

1. create a "Pictures folder" in a place of your desire.

2. Set lightroom to copy photos there.

3. Import photos from your various locations into lightroom (and have lightroom organize by date taken as you suggest)

That way, ALL the photos are moved to ONE master folder... additionally, they will be automatically organized so you don't need to worry about photos being considered duplicates... and you'd have no problem with adding new photos...

I am sure there is software that is able to distinguish duplicate ... ( as a matter of fact I KNOW there is... I just dont know what it is... I remember looking it up for myself a while back... although it could have been JUST for music?) so you could run the program on that ONE master folder... then that third party application would automatically remove all and any duplicates... leaving you with one clean organized catalogue.

[Kerm]

That is brilliant. I'm off to try that.

Thanks dude!

[Argote]

What remus_lupin is saying sounds like a better idea, let Lightroom organize the folders on import.

[remus_lupin]

That is brilliant. I'm off to try that.

Thanks dude!

No worries, and if you ever find a program that will find duplicates, it will be easy to direct it to that folder!!

I might look one up for ya, but I can't right now, I have a major assignment due in like 4 hours and I still have a couple midterms at the end of this week!

[remus_lupin]

I haven't actually used this... just typed into google and this was the first promising result...

Looks like you can give criteria so you could say for example SAME file size plus one other criteria which would find your duplicates pretty fast I bet, it also says it finds photos specifically... try it out and see if it works for ya!

http://www.ashisoft.com/

GOODLUCK :)

As well, I am happy to say I finished the assignment well before the due time (1.5hours)... which I am proud of since my group members are a bunch of ******s and gave me all their parts (which were done poorly at best - some even had extremely idiotic answers) today... I have been hounding them for their parts for the past two weeks. Group projects are hell.