Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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15 years of Iphone pics...big organizational problem (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by stilloriginal@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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So I've had a few iphones over the years, sometimes done backups using itunes back in the day, but always manually just pulled photos off the phones and into backup drives. Now I use icloud but it's only got stuff going back maybe 6 years.

I ran a free software on one of my backup drives to find duplicates and there are many duplicates of the same photos. This should be easy enough to delete the duplicates, but there are other issues...

Iphones name photos like IMG_1234. So, if you have over 10,000 photos, you have duplicates of the same number. Or, if you got a new phone and the people at the apple store couldn't clone your old data onto your new phone and you had to start fresh, you also have duplicates. I don't even take a lot of photos, I'm not that type of person, I actually have to force myself to take more photos generally, but in some cases I have 3 different photos with the same name. The software that finds duplicates knows that they are different, which is good.

So I want to eliminate the duplicates, and get them into folders by year to manage the duplicate file names... but there is one more issue... when you grab iphone files manually, they aren't rotated properly. They might even be left-right mirror reversed in some cases.

The software I am using also won't like, take a single version of each duplicated file and put it in a new folder...I'd have to delete the duplicates and then go find every folder on the drive and manually combine them.

There has to be a better way. Honestly I could probably write a php script to do this, but it might backfire.

Surely someone on this sub has tackled this? TIA

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[–] hedge41@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I wouldn’t say I’ve “tackled” this, but I have tamed things pretty well. I still use Windows Photo Gallery (WPG) to import photos off the phone. It can auto rotate them during importation. I use WPG to add tags and do face ID’ing. By the way, the only file types I bother with are JPG and MOV. I then use Namexif to bulk rename the photos. Then I manually rename any it missed. The pattern I use is “YYYY-MM-DD hh.mm.ss”. Some people like time colons (:), I prefer periods (.). Next I use Geosetter. This baby is fantastic for applying date, time, and location metadata. Believe me, getting photos with correct metadata BACK onto your phone can only happen using something like Geosetter. Finally, if you want your MOVs to also have correct dates, times, and location metadata, use “exiftool”. Exiftool is technically part of Geosetter, but I find the command prompt method works better for MOVs. Let Geosetter handle the JPGs. Finally, and I do mean finally, because oh my gawd does it really take this much effort to have good metadata’d photos on your phone in 2023!!!? Where was I? Oh, then use CopyTrans Photo to transfer the JPGs and MOVs to your phone. Because screw iTunes. And even then CopyTrans Photo will take several attempts before all photos are present and in the correct chronological sequence. Good luck and keep trying and be patient. Having good clean data that works for you instead of against you is possible! -hedge