They's organized!

Between Carolyn and me, our three cameras, and the various well-intentioned but never-completed re-organizational backups, we had amassed about 160,000 files spanning two hard-drives amounting to about 450 GB. Of that, 150GB was an exact duplicate of images due to a recent migration to a bigger hard-drive. That still left me with about 115,000 photos (300GB) that were haphazardly organized, thus giving me no easy way to confidently determine which files I could delete because they were duplicates.

So, as any craftsman would do, I put my own skills to the test and wrote a program. This software would compile a list of all the images files I have, generate a comprehensive structure in which to store the files, and eliminate all duplicates (including JPG versions of RAW files). It would also convert all my (proprietary Nikon) RAW files to (open) Adobe DNG format, and embed pertinent IPTC data (creator, copyright, etc.) into each image as well.



It took me the better part of the week to do it but finally the software - Photo Organizer Lite - was finished. (I scrapped the previous two incarnations - Photo Organizer and Photo Organizer Basic, as they were really too ambitious for the task at hand.) It's actually still running as I write this, but the most critical work is complete - the photo re-organization. Of the 157,359 images the software found 89330 exact duplicates, 7260 duplicate RAW files (where a DNG had already been created), and 29228 duplicate JPGs (where a RAW version already existed).

The happy result is a sensible organization of only about 32,000 unique images (I'll have an exact number when it's complete). I've just freed up almost 350GB of space and I can now confidently find any picture I'm looking for (presuming that I know approximately when it was taken). The next step will be to tag all my images with appropriate keywords (see The Daunting Task) so that my photos will not only be organized, but easily searchable. Methinks that will have to wait until the next time I have a full week off...

PS: In case you didn't catch it, the title is a reference to Chicken Run.

PPS: Oh, and special thanks to Jack who had a hand in (impeding) the development of this software.

Did you jiggle the cable?

I can't think of a single person who hasn't had a computer crash on them at some point. Getting a computer to crash is fairly straight-forward nowadays and doesn't require too much technical skill. However, crashing a printer is another matter.



This is what happens when Vista doesn't support your printer anymore, but you try to trick it into working anyway. Lights flashing, assertion errors, and I could have sworn I heard the printer say "danger, danger!" Maybe it's time to invest in a new printer. Thank you HP and Vista, for making the choice for me.

News Flash: Mom fixes computer!

IT nerds fear for job security!

Yes, it's true, my mom actually opened up her computer, fiddled with wires and plugs and other stuff, and actually made it work again! She did it all by herself, and I wasn't even on the phone with her at the time. So a big round of applause for Momma V. :)