Software for AI picture indexing - help wanted!

Hey,

I have been taking digital pictures since 2002 and have approx. 500K of them archived in various external HDDs. Finally I have decided to index them into a searchable, usable gallery!

 

[Moderator EDIT]

 

Thank you so much for your support!

 

Kind regards,

Edited April 26, 2020 by William Michael

My reaction is that you should edit your shots. I can't imagine looking at even 10,000 shots let alone 500,000, and I suspect most would agree with me. First job I think would be to cut this enormous total down so that you could potentially complete the task before the end of the universe. There must be many repeats and second-rate shots. The trouble is you have left them uncurated for so long you now have a big problem. In Lightroom is easy to assign keywords to multiple images at once, but you still have to look at them.

I've shot well more than 500,000 images over about 45 years both for work and as my hobby. My response follows basically what I have done, with Negatives, Transparencies and Digital files. My initial reaction is similar to Robin's: I'd have a massive culling session before classifying and cataloging, however I come from a slightly different perspective and ask - What is the PURPOSE (i.e. the end uses) for your listed outcomes?

 

[Moderator Edit]

 

WW

Edited April 26, 2020 by William Michael

I didn't go into precisely why anyone other than the author would want to search the 500,000 archive, but I agree. It's not the Library of Congress. BTW I keep any paid for jobs for 7 years (like tax returns), and then I delete them, or I give them to the person who paid for them.

I think OP has an interesting question. Google’ desktop application Picasa was pretty good at cleaning up and do decent face recognition. Thats more than 5 years ago they killed that. I’d imagine someone has produced something more advanced.

I’ve been out of digital photography for a while, so I can’t help, I’m afraid.

I agree that some kind of culling beforehand makes the job easier. It's also good to know in advance how you want to classify your photo archive. That is, what kind of tags to you want to add that will help you - in addition to the Exif data - to find photos. So tags like person, place, location, scene, etc. Most photo organizing and editing apps allow you to manually add tags to large groups of photos (or selections) in one go. This is least means that you're dealing with thumbnails rather rather than with individual photos.

 

[Moderator Edit]

Edited April 26, 2020 by William Michael

Moderator Note:

 

Thank you to those who took their valuable time to respond to this new member's first post here.

Unfortunately this thread is a two part spam exercise.

The Member's content has been removed and the account terminated.

The sincere responses have been edited

This conversation is now closed.

 

William

Edited April 26, 2020 by William Michael