Best SW for organising photos

[craig.walton2]

I am a typical bloke who can’t organise his a**s from his elbow and to that end my storage of images follows suit. I have several external harddrives that have thousands of images stored. As I live in fear that one might fail I have lots of backups of backups. What I am after is some way of scanning all the HD’s and creating a new dated directory with only one copy of the image in and then I can backup this directory. I did try Lightroom but duplicates were created even though I set this up not to happen. Any advice would be greatly received.

[vulcan2912]

Hi Craig

I think that by default Lightroom doesn't import duplicates.My version never does.Have you changed the file names or exif data on your duplicates?
That would possibly explain why they are importing twice.
If you are just wanting to catalogue build there are better programs to use than Lightroom.If you are wanting to use Lightroom to also process your images it makes sense to also use Lightroom for your catalogues.
Do a Google search for DAM software.It will throw up a few programs for you to try.I used to use Acdsee before moving to Lightroom a few years ago.Fastone image viewer might also do the trick.

Cheers
Gary

[craig.walton2]

Thanks very much. I'm not to bothered about batch editing so I'll give DAM(?) sw a try. Hopefully I'll have some sort of system in place were I can browse for images without opening 15 folder on 3 HDs straight away.

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[flossie]

I've not used it myself as Lightroom does my organising perfectly for me (no duplicates btw...), but you could try what The Boss uses to organise - Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/)

[craig.walton2]

I gave Picasa a try but didn't get on with it (or at least it didn't get on with me). I might have to revisit it. Thanks

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[happy haggis]

Another you might like to consider is IDImager. Excellent piece of software and good forum support.