re organising photos

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northernsoul

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Edit My Images
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hi. I now have photos on 2 external Hard Drives, a laptop, a Desktop and on CD's , DVD's and Flash Drives. Many of these photo files are repeated more than once and after losing 3 Hard Drives in 3 years i have no idea where certain photos are. They are in JPEG . RAW and some old type of Nero backup file. I want to put them all on one computer. The problem is i have a Canon Compact and Canon DSLR and a lot of filenumbers are the same but have different photos taken on the Compact and DSLR. When transferring to one computer Windows says you already have that file number. This could be exactly the same photo or a different photo taken on my other Canon camera. I would like to use something that can diferenciate between a copy and a completely different photo even though this has the same filenumber. One way to do this would be to use the date and time, as no 2 different photos can be taken at the same time. Other methods could be used like sorting by file size. Is there any software i can use that can automatically delete an exact copy and also keep a file which has the same file number but taken on a different camera. I do not want to have to check every file manually to delete it. Thanks
 
There are functions within Adobe's Lightroom that could help you sort your images.

However as they seem to be all over the place it may take some time.

The good news is that although Lightroom costs in the region of £200 you can get a 30 day free trial.

Now Lightroom will sort images by date, or File name, Camera, and lots of other parameters. The only problem is you need to have the images "Imported " to it's database. The import may take some time if you have a large number of images spread around a number of drives.

Note Lightroom only works with RAW images, JPEG and TIFF. so if you have a Nero generated file it wont be able to handle them.

Lightroom won't delete multiple images, however if you try to import images with the same file details, provided you've selected "don't import suspected duplicates" in the import option it will only import and store the first instance of that file. However you may want it do do this so you can remove possible duplicates

If you think Lightroom may be the way to go , may I suggest you look at a few of the "How To" videos out on the web before you start. You'll find it a lot easier afterwards.
 
Hi. Thanks for that. I hoped you would say Photoshop Elements 7 because i have just bought it a few weeks ago! but not used it yet. After emailing Adobe they said similar things about Elements 7 ie it has to be within Elements to sort the pictures. Looks like i will have to import all my photos (minus the nero files) into Elements and hopefully be able to sort by date(time as well just in case i have taken the same filenumber on both cameras on the same day-doubtful) Does anyone the differences for this specific task between Lightroom and Elements 7. I will look at the videos. Thanks
 
Sorry can't help with Elements 7 Photoshop and Lightroom user. Maybe someone else on the site will be able to help
 
Elements works the same way as lightroom as in you can sort by capture date and the rest of the methods of sorting and then rename within Elements if you so wish.
 
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