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DESPERATELY NEED PHOTO SORTING HELP!!!

Yes, @bestcee Courtney, I did. But IDK what to do rofl. I looked through my pics a bit, but right now I don't need to add tags or anything to my pics. Also, when I quit LR, it asked me about backing up the catalog and made very clear it doesn't back up the pics. What catalog?! Where does it back up? I'm so confused.

Anyway, I did notice that under the METADATA button, you can search via camera (if known). @cinna, that may help you, if only cuz you can then narrow down your photos by the years you owned that camera, or phone nowadays. [I mention this cuz I noticed that some of the dates under the metadata tab are incorrect--probably cuz some cameras never had their dates set. I've got July 4 pics marked as from January, which is quite wrong!]

Have you tried arranging all the photos by name? For example, when I had an EHD do something similar, I sorted the pics by Name. Then as I looked at the pics, I knew as soon as I saw DD's outfit that I was looking at a pic of her first bday party. Then I could tell that the surrounding photos were also from the same year. Like, all of IMG_3455 to IMG_3600 were January 2014. (And if you've gone through your camera's naming system once before, then it gets a little annoying cuz you can hit SHIFT and select all the pics: you have to grab them one-by-one from between the files with the (2) at the end of the number lol.) It won't be easy, but those special events will help you at least start to get your pics in order again. I'm just trying to think of anything to help you out because you've got a lot of photos to go through, and I know how much that stinks.
 
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lmccandless said:
Do you have Lightroom? It would read the EXIF data and sort them into Smart Collections for you by date.
Click to expand...

Another vote for this- I'll pile on the Lightroom peer pressure. :)

Seriously, Cheryl's video series that Courtney linked above is amazing.

I also did a video on Lightroom for Two Peas in a Bucket years ago. Lots of it is about printing since I was paper scrapping then, but around 21:20 I talk about using Metadata to filter photos by date in Lightroom.


Once you have them filtered by date, you can move them to folders by year (and month and day if you want).
 
I think @bestcee 's analogy is spot on ... for what a LR catalog is/does. Cheryl's videos are great - definitely watch them! And if you want a supplement guide in written/print format, that is easy to understand, this may help you @Tree City (or google for one that appeals to you)

https://digital-photography-school.com/total-beginners-guide-to-lightroom-step-by-step/
here's what they have to say about the catalog:

The Lightroom catalog is like a recipe book
Lightroom stores a record of all the changes you want to make to your images in a separate file called the Catalog, which is stored independent from your pictures. The best analogy I can think of is that of a kitchen: your original pictures are kind of like the raw ingredients in your cupboards, and the Lightroom Catalog is like a recipe book. Lightroom doesn’t do anything to your ingredients (your original files), but instead saves the instructions for transforming your supplies into actual finished products (in this case output edited images), just like recipes for your photos. When you are finished, your original image files still remain, but you have a new creation (i.e. an edited picture) that you can share with others.

and a few other tips about image handling in LR from the article:
  • Lightroom does not edit your original images. They will always remain wherever you put them, and Lightroom does not change them in any way.
  • You are looking at preview versions when you are editing your photos in Lightroom, and not the actual images themselves.
  • A complete record of edits to your photos is kept in a database called the Catalog.Think of this like a recipe book, where you have instructions for how to cook your images, but you are not altering the original ingredients in the kitchen.
  • The editing process is not complete until you Export your images, which saves a new copy of your photos, complete with the changes you made in Lightroom.
And then there's the editing in LR ... all those glorious sliders. I just love it. :beat
 
Thanks for your input (and giggles)! I´m off testing with Lightroom!! :bk
 
One of the only problems with LR (which has been the only part of the CC subscription I use - LOL) is that some dates from our digital cameras all came up with Jan 1 xxxx because neither of us knew to change that setting. I learned before my dh did and so a lot of photos have to be sorted visually. Fortunately, many of his refer to specific occasions.

Also when someone sends me a photo, Mac Photos defaults to the day it's imported rather than the day it was taken.
Otherwise, I love love love LR. But then I'm someone who loves to sort and organize. Virgo to a T.
 
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