as per title, I’ve neglected my ‘my photos’ folder and ive ended up with folders copied from various laptops and even a few recovered folders so lots of duplicates. there’s a couple of hundred gig spanning several years worth of pics.
I’m looking for a simple to use management program i can point at the parent directory and have it sort into some sort of order using the meta data of the pics
what’s everyone using? and while I’m at it, what criteria are people using to sort and organise their folders?

I have RAW and JPG directory, in each are the files downloaded from the camera with the following directory name:

CCYY-MM-DD-<description of photos>

CCYY – year
MM – month
DD – day

This means that all photos are listed in chronological order and are backed up with a description of the contents of the files – makes finding things very easy.

picasa is worth a look (free too)

dunno if it will do what you want but Picasa is meant to be good.

I need to sort mine too.

+1 for Picasa as well. If you get the face recognition going and you haven’t lost the dates on the photos then it does quite a good job (assuming that the pics are mainly people)

Elements tries to take it a little further and attempts to identify groups, closeups, individuals, high quality photos and a couple of other categories but it can be a bit hit and miss and the face recognition doesn’t seem as good

Picasa everytime. Facial recognition is a great bonus too. You don’t need to sort the images – it just finds them all on your HD.

picasa