use synctoy to clean up photos in multiple folders?

[Guest]

I have a mess. I've put photos all over the place on multiple machines.
I've got backup copies of some of the photos. Some folders contain subsets
of other fol;ders. What I would like to do is clean up this mess by creating
a single folder with an instance of every photo that I have. Once that set of
photos is created, I can organize them into subdirectoreies as appropriate
and manage things from there.

Right now I am looking at setting up a single target folder for the unique
photos. I will then create a folder pair for every single folder that has
photos. I will set up each existing folder as the left side and the new
target folder as the right. Then I will "contribute" the files left to
right. This is cumbersome, but I think it will work (and it will only need
to be done once.)

First of all, will this work? Secondly, is there an easier way to do what I
want?

Thanks for your help.

Mark

 

[Guest]

SyncToy would be more useful once you have organized your photos on a single
PC. Synctoy would then be useful to automatically back up your photos to
another PC or a DVD-RW.

I wouldn't put all your photos all together yet. Some of them might be
organized under in a folder for a reason, maybe vacation photos, or photos
from a certain year, old attempts at backup, etc.

Find all your photos on the various PCs they currently live on, copy (don't
move yet) them onto a PC under a folder like "my photos" on a single PC,
keeping them in the folders they currently are in. There are many shareware
utilities you can find for finding duplicate photos. Run one of these to
clean up the duplicate photos.

Now you are ready to rename the folders to make them meaningful, create new
folders, etc

When your photos are organized, use SyncToy to make a copy of all your
photos on another PC or a DVD-R or RW, and now you are ready to go back and
delete all the old photos you have on various PCs.