Digital Decluttering: Tagging, Deduping, and Replicating the Photo Collection (Premium)

With my photo collection consolidation project finally completed after several months of work, it was time to move on to the next steps: Cleaning up the photos (which involved ensuring that all of the photos have reasonably good "Date taken" meta-data, with as few duplicates as possible, and so on) and then uploading the collection to various cloud services and my NAS for backup/replication purposes. Given the volume of files involved, I knew I'd need to work in stages. And I figured the skills I developed during the consolidation process would help. Which they did.

This is what the photo collection looks like in OneDrive, which is where I did all this work. The root of the folder has an "Old pictures" folder plus one folder for each year from 2000 to now, and that "Old pictures" folder likewise has one subfolder for each year from 1999 on back.

I began with the photos in "Old pictures" for the obvious, logical reason that this folder represents the beginning years of the collection. But also because this part of the collection is relatively small from a file count/disk size perspective, and it would be easier to experiment with. (As with everything I've been doing, I made sure to work with copies of the collection and not the source, just in case.) For example, there are only 90 files in the collection with a 1969 date or older.

The first hurdle was figuring out how I could easily find those photos with no "Date taken" meta-data. But I had an idea.

I had previously used two utilities, Bulk Rename Utility (BRU) and MediaSorter, to organize loose photos into organized, date-based folders, and files with incorrect or missing meta-data were made obvious by the way they were copied: Files without meta-data were dumped into the root of the destination folder (instead of in a date-based folder), and files with wildly wrong meta-data were copied into a sub-folder that didn't make any sense (like a 2016 folder while I was consolidating 2004 or whatever). So I figured I could use one of those tools to copy some subset of the collection to the desktop, organize the copied files in date-based folders, and then examine the files that weren't correctly organized: Those photos would need to be fixed in the source (master) collection.

After experimenting with MediaSorter, which is the simpler tool, I ended up relying on the more complex and more powerful BRU instead. This requires a very specific in-app configuration, which it loses every time I close it, but it works perfectly: Working in batches---all folders in "Old pictures" through the 1960s, and then the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in turn---I made local, organized copies of these subsets of the photo collection. Some had a few issues. Some had many issues, especially in the middle of the 1980s, where I Past Paul had let down future Paul by scanning tons of photos but not correctly tagging them. But it went surprisingly quickly. By Saturday, I had cleaned up all of "Old pictures." An...