I want to organize 15 years worth of pictures files

Over the years I amassed a huge collection of (digital) pictures. They’re all scattered over 3 laptops and a couple of desktops (and google drive). They need sorting out, delete duplicates and redundant pictures and organised by year / occasions etc.

Are there any reasonably priced tools to help with that?

Wouldn’t google photos at least group them by date?

Yeah, download the Google Backup and Sync app for photos and videos.

https://photos.google.com/apps

Select ‘High Quality’ uploads, so the space is unlimited, and on each device point it to the folders where you have pics and videos. They’ll all upload to your photos account and get sorted by date, as well as location if the pics were taken with a phone. You can then make albums, tag people, etc.

I found https://www.digikam.org/ pretty good at sorting out duplicates, albeit with a little human intervention. I had consolidated 7 odd years to a single hard drive, though. Worth a try for the price of free.

Guys, I was asking for a paid solution, not some hackneyed freeware opensource hack ;P

Seriously, thanks for the tips. I’ll give digikam a go as I need to sort out a bunch of duplicates, don’t mind some manual intervention. I expected to do a lot of that anyway, some of these picture were taken with a very old digital camera and I suspect they lack any sort of metadata so we’ll have to sort by guessing the age of the child. Amazing how much progress we made in 15 years.

I have a brand new SSD coming in to use as a consolidator, so I know what I’ll be doing in the next few weekends.

Are you retired? If you’re like me there’s just too many pictures, too many near duplicates, and too much effort to sort let alone fix them up with levels, sharpening, and cropping. So I gave up. If I were to look at the folder, I’d probably use windows explorer in extra large icon view, go through fast and grab say 1/200 that catches my eye and looks sharp and well exposed.

60 pictures of fireworks from July 4, 2011? Skip. 80 pics from your cousin’s wedding in 2008? Eh, that one looks sharp. And so on.

Of course this could be me just giving an excuse why I gave up on the task. Good luck! :)