Browse unique photos and videos on Windows laptop.

July 4, 2013 4:39 AM

I am looking for software which would allow me search my Windows 7 laptop for every photo and video I have. Browsing the search results I would like to be able to see both pictures and videos in thumbnail form. I would then like to be able to copy all unique files to a hard-drive. Once copied I would like to organise them into folders chronologically.

I have 3 years+ of family photos which are strewn throughout my computer. They have come from phones, camcorders, cameras, emails etc. Fearful of ever deleting unique photos I have ended up with many, many, many duplicates. Previous attempts to tame the photos have failed.

I am aware that similar questions have been asked but I have yet to see/find software which will help with the initial photo collection taming process.

I am also aware that I may need multiple programmes to find files, de-duplicate, move to backup drive and to catalogue.

I am more than willing to purchase software and strongly suspect that free/shareware which ticks all the boxes does not exist.

Thanks for reading.

posted by therubettes to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: Picasa, free.

Note that it is not necessary to upload any of the photos to the internet or use the Google+ service. Picasa is intended by Google's marketing department to be used as an attractant to Google's web service, but it is an extremely capable stand-alone photo manager that they bought from someone else.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:49 AM on July 4, 2013 [3 favorites]

Came to recommend Picasa for this task; call this a second.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 5:05 AM on July 4, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks guys. Fits the bill.

Also just spotted the Tools --> Experimental --> Identify Duplicates option in the menu!!
posted by therubettes at 8:29 AM on July 4, 2013

There is a freeware Java program, DIM (Digital Image Mover) by Alan Light, that can automatically sort your images/videos into folders by date using the EXIF data. It detects and does not copy duplicates (depending on preferences). I use it in conjunction with Picasa (grab folder of unidentified images, run DIM on them to sort them into folders by Pictures/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD, then let Picasa index them for whatever other purposes I want.)

You will have to change the preferences to stop the program from renaming moved images (don't know why renaming them is the default) but other than that, it's great, and free. On Windows you may need to invoke it via command line depending on Java version due to a minor bug introduced by later Java builds. (Bug in the code, not in Java - the program now requires a command line switch to make it open and run successfully).
posted by caution live frogs at 8:42 AM on July 4, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks caution live frogs. I will check it out also.
posted by therubettes at 1:44 AM on July 5, 2013