Digital Photo Organization, De-duplication, and Local Sharing (with database?)

Hello! I’d like to get my digital photographs in order after many years (and many disorganized local backups) and I figured it might be best to reach out to the community here for any tips that might help save me from issues I’m ignorant of at the moment.

The Situation

I have several years of photographs of all types backed up in a haphazard way (i.e. duplicates of duplicates, etc) and I’m hoping to do the following things:

  1. Deduplicate
  2. Move unique photos into a newly organized folder structure (open to thoughts – I generally like the idea of YYYY-MM/ structure).
  3. Setup local sharing of photos (and possibly a digikam database maybe) in my home (we use all Linux machines and FreeNAS would be the intended source of the shared photos).

One of the problems I’ve run into is Digikam having crashed while trying to catalog or de-duplicate photos from a shared network drive – I’m thinking I’m either doing this with the wrong tool, in the wrong way, or both.

I’m very open to other tools or more questions. Really appreciate any help or guidance!

Hey Kyle! Welcome. We follow each other on mastodon :slight_smile:

I’d probably approach it like this:

  1. Get all the photos in one place
  2. Make a backup of that.
  3. Use a CLI tool like fslint to find exact duplicates. fslint is nice because it hashes files, so the file names don’t have to be the same.
  4. Decide if you want to rename the files. Decide on a file naming scheme if so.
  5. Decide on a folder naming/sorting convention.
  6. Use exiv2 or exiftool to do the sorting and renaming.
  7. Import into digiKam.
  8. Start tagging. DigiKam is working on facial tagging right now. If you’re super tech, you can use something like tensorflow to do some tagging. There is also a new CLI that can do object tagging. Or just tag by hand.

Make backups all along the way.

2 Likes

Could you elaborate on this by chance?

There is a CLI interface here: Plugin for creating automatic tags

I am wondering what version of digiKam do you use and on what platform?

I use the AppImage currently on KDE Neon, but that computer changes frequently.