On Oct 28, 2009, at 8:31 PM, Russell wrote:

> It is almost certain that no existing duplicate management system  
> will meet my need and I'll have to write something myself. But, it  
> would be nice to hear what people do to manage such large  
> collections. "Doing it properly" (apart from doing it from the  
> start) probably involves correlation of core file names, date/time

Yeah, I have often thought that photos (and probably videos too) have  
enough meta-content that it ought to be possible to put together some  
really nice utilities for non-visual tasks like collection merging,  
duplicate elimination, backup (duplicate creation, eh?)  Some of the  
organization packages do a pretty good job of this just by virtue of  
the way they organize their photo database (ie iphoto puts things in  
directories by date of photo taken, which is pretty helpful for  
detecting duplicates. Two files of the same name and size that were  
taken on the same date most likely are duplicates...)  Google's Picasa  
tools do something similar.  But it ought to be possible to do tasks  
outside the fancy GUIs a lot more efficiently, and especially so if  
you add "intimate" knowledge of how the major photo programs organize  
their data.

The only thing I've heard of so far is some CLI utilities that will  
let you do things based on the exif and other jpeg photo info, and  
some people have written substantial scripts on top of these to  
automatically organize photos as they're taken.

Let us know what you find out.

BillW

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