Alright, let me tell you about this thing I tackled recently, dealing with a mountain of pictures I just called the ‘ko pictures’ job because I really wanted to knock ’em out, get it sorted.
So, picture this: years and years of digital photos piling up. Old hard drives, random folders on my main machine, stuff from old phones. It was a complete disaster zone. Thousands of images, duplicates everywhere, weird filenames, no real organization to speak of. Finding anything specific was like digging for treasure without a map. It was getting ridiculous, honestly. Just dead weight clogging up space.
Getting Started – The Mess
First off, I actually tried the manual approach. You know, open up a folder, squint at thumbnails, drag stuff around, make new folders like ‘Summer 2015 maybe?’ or ‘Important_pics_v2_final’. Spent a whole Saturday afternoon doing this. Barely made a dent. It was slow, painful, and incredibly boring. My eyes hurt, my clicking finger hurt. I knew this wasn’t going to work. There were just too damn many files.
Finding a Better Way
I needed a system, or at least some kind of help. Started looking around for tools. Nothing too fancy, I didn’t want to spend ages learning complex software. Found a couple of programs that claimed to find duplicate files. Picked one that looked simple enough, seemed pretty straightforward.
Installed it. Then, I pointed it at the biggest, messiest hard drive first. Kind of held my breath and clicked ‘scan’. Figured it would take ages, so I just let it run overnight.
The Process – Chugging Along
Next morning, checked it. Wow. It had found gigs and gigs of duplicate photos. Exact copies, slightly different sizes, the works. That alone was a huge win.
- Step 1: Went through the duplicate list. The tool made it easy to compare them side-by-side. Mostly kept the highest resolution one and told the tool to trash the rest. This took a while, still had to approve the deletions, but way faster than doing it manually.
- Step 2: With the duplicates gone, the pile was smaller, but still messy. Started a basic folder structure. Something simple like `YEAR > MONTH` or `YEAR > EVENT`.
- Step 3: Began moving the remaining photos into these new folders. This was still manual, but much more manageable. I wasn’t trying to make it perfect, just good enough. Sometimes I’d just dump photos from a period into the month folder if I couldn’t remember the exact event. Good enough is better than a total mess.
- Step 4: Repeated this process for the other drives and messy spots on my computer. Scan for duplicates, delete ’em, sort the rest into the main structure.
Hitting Snags
It wasn’t all smooth. One time the duplicate finder crashed halfway through a big scan. Had to restart it. Another time, I got a bit click-happy and almost deleted a folder of unique photos – thankfully caught it before emptying the recycle bin. Phew. Also realized some photos didn’t have proper date info embedded, so sorting by date wasn’t always reliable. Had to rely on filenames or just memory for those.
The Result – Finally KO’d
Took me maybe three or four evenings all told? But at the end, it was done. The beast was tamed. No more thousands of mystery duplicates eating up space. I actually have a structure now where I can roughly find photos from a specific year or event. It’s not museum-archive perfect, but it’s usable. It feels way lighter now.
Honestly, just getting started was the hardest part. Once I found a tool to handle the worst of it (the duplicates), the rest felt achievable. Big relief to have that job knocked out. Now I just need to be better about sorting new photos as they come in… maybe.
