Help, ideas on file sorting, its a mess!

Hey

Somehow over 2-3 years I've managed to collect about 20,000+ photo files in random dated folders, named folders, you name it and its a complete mess.

I've got CS2 and recently Lightroom. Is there a way for lightroom to take all my images and restore them in year and date folders for me? Would putting them all on an external HD and importing them back in with lightroom do this?

I'd stick all 20k in one folder but many now have the same file names as my 350D went around the clock and a recent new body starting from IMG_0001.

Take a look at either Downloader Pro (my preference) or the free ImageIngester Pro; both will do what you want. They work by reading the dates and times encoded in each image's EXIF and sort according to any parameter you set.

Also, make sure you read the manual and understand the capabilities of these programs; they are both quite powerful.

FedkaTheConvict wrote in post #5200927
Take a look at either Downloader Pro (my preference) or the free ImageIngester Pro; both will do what you want. They work by reading the dates and times encoded in each image's EXIF and sort according to any parameter you set.

Thank you very much! Any ideas what will happen to my edited copies with no EXIF intact?

I suppose you'll have to organize those manually. Why would you strip out the EXIF anyway?

FedkaTheConvict wrote in post #5200947
I suppose you'll have to organize those manually. Why would you strip out the EXIF anyway?

Never intentionally but a few files have been run through Photomatix, have to check when I get home but they lose some EXIF as far as I know, hopefully dates etc are still there.

Pete,

Downloader pro is worth it's weight in gold IMO - It just makes downloading and organising so easy once you have set it up.

My files are organised as follows:

Camera (Canon 20D)
Year (2008 )
Month (03_March, 04_April etc.)
Date and Job Code (2008-03-29 Joe Blogs portriat session)

This works for me and DL Pro does it all for me - It just asks me for the 'job code' and it does the rest.