[randomluck040]

My naive solution was to gather everything at one place before sorting everything and backing it up on a NAS. It was a lot of work but I didn’t find anything that could’ve helped me to accelerate the process so I did it manually. After having everything at a single place it was pretty straight forward though. I’m using directories to sort my stuff because at the end it’s independent of software and tags that might deprecate at some point. I’ve backed everything up using rsync.

[pettycashstash2]

Thanks for this. I feel somewhat overwhelmed myself. I am on device 1 of x. X because I actually don't want to know how many more i have to go though. I am manually copying things into 1 location. I also fear once done I will have to deal with deduplication, etc. I started with windows machine and found microsoft's robocopy. Supposedly its an improved version of xcopy. Still copying.........

[randomluck040]

That‘s what I use on Windows machines as well. I have to admit that I don’t care too much about duplicates as long as it’s not Gigabytes of dupes. There is software that might help with getting rid of duplicates (see Excire), the question is how much time it would take and how many TB of storage I could buy with the time lost. Outside of that: if images are meaningful to you, think about printing them out. It’s a different way of remembering the images and a printed out version feels different than digital. You don’t even have to hang them but touch them and go through them once in a while (I tend to not look through digital images ever after „archiving“ them). Good luck and don’t give up. It’s ugly for the first time but if you control the influx of new images in a meaningful way it‘ll get easier.