Hi there,
I purchased a reasonably large external drive to begin the above process. I currently have a number of different backups of my photographs taken on my nikon, fuji and iphones. I've put them all onto one big drive, sourced from two other external drives, two pc's and my current mac. It's a little over 1 TB in size.
What I'd like to do, is to consolidate the multiple versions of files down to just one version, with a view to then going through all of the photos over the next couple of weeks and discarding all the stuff I don't need and keeping and archiving the stuff that I consider is good or worth keeping. Trouble is, there is a lot of files and some are in triplicate.
I've been looking online and there seems to programs that will look at all the files and remove duplicates but none are filling me with confidence. When I worked in post production sound for cinema, we had programs that would do this. That was twenty years ago now and I'm sure things have moved on.
I'm willing to throw money at this problem but would rather not with out a bit of advice. I also accept, that the only way to do this might be to go through each and every shot individually.
Like I said, all the photos are on one big drive. The individual backups / copies are in discrete folders that are called pc 1 or pc2 or hd 500gb etc.
Any suggestions on how to get myself out of this hole without losing stuff or driving myself mad?!!!!! I'm hoping to do this just once and be a good organised boy in the future
I purchased a reasonably large external drive to begin the above process. I currently have a number of different backups of my photographs taken on my nikon, fuji and iphones. I've put them all onto one big drive, sourced from two other external drives, two pc's and my current mac. It's a little over 1 TB in size.
What I'd like to do, is to consolidate the multiple versions of files down to just one version, with a view to then going through all of the photos over the next couple of weeks and discarding all the stuff I don't need and keeping and archiving the stuff that I consider is good or worth keeping. Trouble is, there is a lot of files and some are in triplicate.
I've been looking online and there seems to programs that will look at all the files and remove duplicates but none are filling me with confidence. When I worked in post production sound for cinema, we had programs that would do this. That was twenty years ago now and I'm sure things have moved on.
I'm willing to throw money at this problem but would rather not with out a bit of advice. I also accept, that the only way to do this might be to go through each and every shot individually.
Like I said, all the photos are on one big drive. The individual backups / copies are in discrete folders that are called pc 1 or pc2 or hd 500gb etc.
Any suggestions on how to get myself out of this hole without losing stuff or driving myself mad?!!!!! I'm hoping to do this just once and be a good organised boy in the future
I've 30,000 RAW images. I knew I needed to do this two years ago. I've been looking through them as they are importing into Lightroom. I am hoping when it finishes importing, it'll sort everything by date and I'm going to start going through every single shoot and I'm going to rate the good ones. I've set lightroom to not import duplicates, so I'll see how well it does but I expect it may be tomorrow before it's completed all it's tasks. 
