15 years of Iphone pics...big organizational problem

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

15 comments

I’ve moved all my photos from iCloud and Google photos to Immich.

It’s an amazing bit of self hosted kit… and so feature rich it’s crazy.

Certainly worth a try!
Technically I still have the old phones as well and theoretically could install itunes and try to hook it up, don't know if that would help or not...or if the phones even work. This is going back to iphone 3.
Have you tried contacting HARRY_SPEEF On Instagram? he's the expert that helped me when i had same issue some weeks back
Strongly recommend using something like Advanced File Renamer, or Adobe Bridge for a project like this. What I did was batch rename all my photos to their respective dates/times so each filename is both unique and informative. It also makes it easy to restore your metadata in the future if it ever gets stripped during a file transfer or something; You’ll always know what date/time each photo was taken just by looking at the file name.
- This.
  
  On Mac:
  
  Import using "Image Capture" - pro tip: DO NOT plug your iphone into usb on a dock. For some reason it always hangs or drops the upload. I plug direct into back of M1Mac. Import each device source to a separate folder
  
  I use Hazel to do renaming based on time/date/device
  
  Dump all together into same folder
  
  I use Gemini II to delete duplicates.
  
  Now you have all photos in one folder, named with useful date stamps, and device that was used to take them imprinted in the file names. If metadata was retained during your uploads you can resort the whole archive by date. Do your own file management.
  
  Probably easier ways but this always works for me. Only big suck is the import.
  
  EDIT: if you uncloud your photos and keep them hardcopy just always make sure to follow good backup policy!
I have the exact same problem as the OP. Years of photos from my family's combined iPhone albums, lots of duplicates, conflicting fie names, etc. I'll be following this thread to see what you come up with!
iPhone photo management is horrible. I have the same problem and have yet to solve the issue. I have run deduplication software on my photos so many times.
- It’s built in the photos app …
  
  I don’t want to keep a decade of photos on my cell phone.
Dump all the folders into digikam. You can rename, reorganise, dedupe, add tags, detect faces, add geotags and so so much more. It will take some time and doing but you will have your entire photo library in the exact shape you want.
Upload all to iCloud, use the built in duplicate manager (doable directly on your iPhone in the photos app).

It will look at more than just the file name…

Then do a clean backup using icloudpd which will neatly file them by year, month and day
- How do you get them into icloud?
  
  Using the website or connecting to your iCloud account on each phone. Photos app will do it
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

You've viewed 15 comments.