My hard drive is nearly completely full of photos, built up over a decade of just dumping my camera and phone memory into a bunch of folders - I will find some offline or cloud space for them somewhere, but it occurred to me that I should probably sift them first and delete the dross - the folders are a real mix of photos of my kids, which I really want to keep, and pictures of random trees and stuff that I can’t remember why I ever took.
I have tried opening the folders scrolling through and ctrl-clicking then deleting a bunch of images, but in order to get thumbnails big enough to evaluate, that’s a lot of scrolling between selection clicks. I have 33,000 photos to sift.
What I want is an app that I can point at a folder that will show me photos in turn, and allow me to swipe left or right depending on whether I want to discard or keep the photo
I don’t know of any program that uses the “swipe right/swipe left” interface (nor would I want to) but you should givesome versionof ACDSee a try–I’ve been using it probably more than 20 years.
It’s a long shot, but if you installed KDE on Windows, [ KDE is a Linux manager that can run in Windows ] you could use Gwenview the default KDE image viewer which is best in class.
No swiping, but the ‘browse’ screen for a folder of images, showing thumbnails, shows about 70 big enough to read images onscreen [ although obviously the folder can scroll to 1000s ] that can be individually deleted with the mouse. ( Or moved, rotated, and many other things. )
For quickly sorting through photos on a Windows computer, I like FastStone Image Viewer. It’s free, legit, and very fast. It allows you to tag each photo with one key press. My workflow is simple; zip through the photos, advancing through them by hitting the space bar, tagging the ones I want to keep by pressing the \ key. The program displays photos full screen, advancing through even large file size ones with no delay. Once I’ve gone through them all, I select all the tagged ones (ALT + ), move them to a subfolder, and delete the remainder. I went through a number of programs in a search for one that would let me quickly cull photos, and this is the best I found.
One caveat, the program doesn’t seem to handle, or even recognize, video files. Unless I’m missing something, it’s only for photos.
Have you looked at Google Photos? Being Google, the search is really very good. I have my phone set up to dump everything in the cloud, and when I take my camera out, I just upload everything straight from the memory card. Did I mention unlimited storage space?
Every now and then I do a search for “document” or “vegetables” (I take pics of my harvests, OK?) and delete them all, just so navigating by date is a bit quicker. The face recognition is pretty good, but, like Facebook, it can’t distinguish between me and my sister. (We’re identical twins.)
I use v2.41. I never upgraded because they started to add bloat that slowed it down. I think they sorted themselves out and a more recent version would probably be fine to use again, but for now I have stuck with what works.
Having said that, my hard drive is not exactly brilliantly organised.
I think 2.41 is the version I use, too. It does have one limitation that is annoying when you run across it, though–the inability to sort files without leading zeros, so that 10.jpg and 100.jpg would be listed before 2.jpg and 20.jpg. For that situation, I have a newer (but still more than 10 years old) version of ACDSee that I use only for adding leading zeros (making it 002.jpg, 010.jpg, 020.jpg, 100.jpg) or however I want to rename the series.
Thanks - this sounds promising. I need to see the images full screen to decide on whether to keep or discard - so thumbnail-based views are not really any good