Easily visually sort photos
June 21, 2023 6:32 PM Subscribe
I’m looking for some software/script with keyboard support to swiftly sort a LARGE number of images one at a time visually?
I have a slab of 40,000+ photos that includes many years of *everything* from several photographers and many devices.
I want to visually sort them into arbitrary collections, for example, holidays, work, family but also subjective like “junk” or “especially pleasing”.
The best workflow would be a program that displayed the image, allowed the user to press a key to categorize (e.g. v for visually pleasing, h for holidays) , copied the image to the relevant folder (or applied a relevant tag, I’m not fussy), then displayed the next photo.
The key thing is streamlining the display of the images so it is really fast to tap, tap, tap through photos swiftly dealing with each with a keystroke.
I am aware of Google Photos and its ability to categorise on faces, places, times etc. but this doesn’t meet my needs - I just want to swiftly view each image and assign it.
Does anybody have any suggestions?
I have a slab of 40,000+ photos that includes many years of *everything* from several photographers and many devices.
I want to visually sort them into arbitrary collections, for example, holidays, work, family but also subjective like “junk” or “especially pleasing”.
The best workflow would be a program that displayed the image, allowed the user to press a key to categorize (e.g. v for visually pleasing, h for holidays) , copied the image to the relevant folder (or applied a relevant tag, I’m not fussy), then displayed the next photo.
The key thing is streamlining the display of the images so it is really fast to tap, tap, tap through photos swiftly dealing with each with a keystroke.
I am aware of Google Photos and its ability to categorise on faces, places, times etc. but this doesn’t meet my needs - I just want to swiftly view each image and assign it.
Does anybody have any suggestions?
I think both Lightroom and Darktable (a free alternative) has some capability for this. Darktable lets you go through images on the keyboard and add two kinds of preset marks to them with single keystrokes. The first is a rating from 0 to 5 stars, which I suppose you could treat as 6 different values but makes more sense as intended -- as a way to define how much you like the picture. The second is a set of 5 colour flags; red, yellow, green, blue, purple (you can assign more than one to an image). Those could definitely be used for those purposes, but you could also assign your own meanings to them - red is pictures of people, yellow is pictures of food, whatever.
It also has manual tagging, which I believe can be done in a complex fashion where you can do nesting tags, directory style:
Holidays |
Holidays | Earth Day
Holidays | Labour Day
Holidays | Labour Day | 2021
Holidays | Labour Day | 2022
or whatever. This involves more typing and mousing (although you set tags and it will search through the tags as you type so you not as much typing as you think).
But some types of tags you might want to add, you could add in bulk -- if you were on holiday from May 14 to 27th, you can select all the images taken on that day, and add the holiday tag once. Same for aspect ratio (I tag my photos portrait / landscape / panorama, because sometimes I'm filling a certain type of space). If the photos are geotagged (with lat/long coordinates, which by default smart phone pics are), then there's also a map that lets you either create a 'zone' and select all the photos in that area (Aunt Pam's house), or search for a defined location on OpenStreetMap (e.g. a country or state) and select all the photos in that location. And of course you could select all of the pictures you tagged with a colour and assign them a tag that is clearer and makes more sense.
You could then export your groups of photos to different directories if you want, but keeping all of them inside the program is much more powerful; what happens if you want to find a visually appealing picture from your trip to Queensland that features the ocean? And you want only the ones in in portrait orientation?
posted by Superilla at 10:54 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
It also has manual tagging, which I believe can be done in a complex fashion where you can do nesting tags, directory style:
Holidays |
Holidays | Earth Day
Holidays | Labour Day
Holidays | Labour Day | 2021
Holidays | Labour Day | 2022
or whatever. This involves more typing and mousing (although you set tags and it will search through the tags as you type so you not as much typing as you think).
But some types of tags you might want to add, you could add in bulk -- if you were on holiday from May 14 to 27th, you can select all the images taken on that day, and add the holiday tag once. Same for aspect ratio (I tag my photos portrait / landscape / panorama, because sometimes I'm filling a certain type of space). If the photos are geotagged (with lat/long coordinates, which by default smart phone pics are), then there's also a map that lets you either create a 'zone' and select all the photos in that area (Aunt Pam's house), or search for a defined location on OpenStreetMap (e.g. a country or state) and select all the photos in that location. And of course you could select all of the pictures you tagged with a colour and assign them a tag that is clearer and makes more sense.
You could then export your groups of photos to different directories if you want, but keeping all of them inside the program is much more powerful; what happens if you want to find a visually appealing picture from your trip to Queensland that features the ocean? And you want only the ones in in portrait orientation?
posted by Superilla at 10:54 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
I've done this with IrfanView. If I remember correctly, there's a thumbnail mode with a preview (not full-res) where you can use keyboard shortcuts to switch between images and assign tags.
posted by demi-octopus at 11:18 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by demi-octopus at 11:18 PM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
There's a very active twitter discussion on this today and people putting up scripts and workflows
https://twitter.com/Kaelberviridae/status/1671590568118599680
posted by unearthed at 3:50 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
https://twitter.com/Kaelberviridae/status/1671590568118599680
posted by unearthed at 3:50 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Thanks for the responses. I tried to ask very broadly, so as not to limit answers, but I’ve also been thinking about using a combination of Irfanview and Autohotkey, so I’ll investigate further in those angles.
Very coincidental that a similar question popped up on Twitter, and it has some responses using Python too, I’ll look at that.
It seems like the kind of problem others have too, so I’’m interested in any other approaches.
posted by bystander at 4:50 AM on June 22, 2023
Very coincidental that a similar question popped up on Twitter, and it has some responses using Python too, I’ll look at that.
It seems like the kind of problem others have too, so I’’m interested in any other approaches.
posted by bystander at 4:50 AM on June 22, 2023
I've used Adobe Bridge for this (it's free to install with an Adobe Creative Cloud account). The number keys apply a rating or label to the currently viewed picture, then you can filter the pictures in a folder by the rating/label and move them around. Tagging is also available but I'm not sure if there's an easy keyboard shortcut for it.
Bridge is nice for file management in general, especially on Mac where normally cut/paste on files is a bit fraught. It's also a pretty fast viewer since it pre-caches the image previews.
posted by neckro23 at 12:29 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
Bridge is nice for file management in general, especially on Mac where normally cut/paste on files is a bit fraught. It's also a pretty fast viewer since it pre-caches the image previews.
posted by neckro23 at 12:29 PM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
iMatch is a very well established Digital Asset Management (DAM) program that may automate a lot of what you want to do. Facial recognition for example. There is a visual guide to its features.
posted by Sophont at 1:19 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Sophont at 1:19 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
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