[digiKam-users] Help - Consolidation

[Sveinn í Felli]

Hi David;

There are many ways to do this, depending mostly on what you'd want to 
achieve and how you are used to work.
First and foremost; how would you want to organize and name your 
images/videos? Do you want the images and videos in separate folder 
structures or perhaps sorted in folders by date/time?

For instance, I use three different approaches simultaneously;

1. General photography (Pictures-folder), where pictures are downloaded 
via DigiKam into few topic-related folders (Home, Family, Travel, Work, 
etc.) and then into folders named 'yyyy-mm-monthname'. These images get 
names with first letter designating the camera/phone, then a 
'date-time-number' sequence plus the extension. To each their own 
preferences ;-)

2. Work related images (Documents-folder), mixed with other types of 
files and documents in a folder structure based on tasks and clients. 
These images may come from email, the internet or being shot at some 
specific site. Naming is often derived from original images or task/client.

3. My scanning work, a multitude of scans mixed with data such as 
GPX/GPS, lots of different versions, heavily edited in various software; 
only the final versions then may get sent into either of the two 
aforementioned collections. Naming is mostly serial version-numbers.

DigiKam handles these three locations as different collections (DK only 
sees supported images/videos) and I use DigiKam mostly to tag them, 
write descriptions and captions, and sometimes for light retouches or 
batch-renaming.

But to answer your questions (in context of my workflow):

1: Can I use digiKam to find and consolidate those photos and videos?

Yes, if you mount each of your HDDs in some logical place, and make them 
a (temporary) collection in DK, you could browse them in DK and move (or 
copy) the images/videos to relevant places in your main collection.
No problem, but (there's always a 'but') it *may* be faster to move the 
images/videos via a file-manager or by scripting. DK may add an extra 
layer and some overhead to the operations, while basic file-managers 
tend to be optimized for using multiple cores simultaneously. Some 
operations in DK can be seriously time-consuming (as in tens of hours), 
especially fingerprinting and facial recognition.

Just thoughts - good luck,
Sveinn í Felli

PS: Regarding your spec-info no. 2:

Since our digital life is more and more recorded in images/videos, the 
price for recovering data from defunct HDDs is always mounting. I would 
seriously consider setting up a multiple-disk RAID as your main data 
storage instead of the older HDDs, a triple identical-disk RAID should 
not be so complicated.
Not forgetting something for backup too...


Þann 20.9.2021 22:42, skrifaði David Prellwitz:
> Sorry if this has been requested before - I just couldn't find any
> references. I need to consolidation 20+ years of photos from myself, family
> and friends.
> 
> My configuration:
> 
> 1.	I have Windows 10Pro with:
> 
> a.	i7 3200 Processor; 32Gb Ram; 500GB SSD boot drive; NVida 2060 GPU;.
> b.	(5) hard drives; 100Gb to 2Tb.
> 
> 2.	Each hard drive is from a different CPU, and each has different
> directories with various types of photos and videos.
> 3.	I've established a 680GB disk to accept all of the images for my
> use.
> 4.	I've installed digiKam 7.3.0 for Windows.
> 
> My problem is how to get these into a common library/location for easier
> management! (or, should I even do that?)
> 
> Questions:
> 
> 1:            Can I use digiKam to find and consolidate those photos and
> videos?
> 
>                  If yes, how?
> 
> 2.            If no, any suggestions on how to get this done?
> 
>   
> 
> Thank You!
> 
> /David
> 
>