BleepingComputer.com: Software for Photo Editing and/or Organizing Photos

I'm looking for a way to organize my photos mostly. Right now I have photos scattered all over the place. I have two different computers - a MAC Snow Leopard Imac and a Windows 7 Laptop. I have I-Photo which I'm trying to get away from because it has tricked me too many times into deleting photos that it appears I have 6 or 7 of same thing only to find all end up getting deleted (of duplicates triplicates etc). I have kodak, I had gmail photos whatever that is I forget, I have picasa and picnik - photos in sub folders and just basically a nightmare - i have photos on dropbox -

how can I (there used to be some software free I think that would show duplicates without manually checking). Of course if you rename something that looks the same and one has a label like C100032.jpg which tells you nothing about the subject/content and then you have something like my2kidswithdog.jpg or something like that which tells you more you will have to manually check duplicates I guess.

Any ideas where to start? I'm thinking I need to get them all onto a hard drive backup so if anything disappears I can reclaim it???? I lost a lot of photos to an online accident and also 2 computers stolen so is a mess for sure. Thanks for tips.

This post has been edited by kcsummer: 06 November 2011 - 03:01 AM

Have you tried simply using Windows Search and then searching for *.jpg? You have a a number of sort methods and of course you can set the icon of the photo
to Extra Large or Large to be able to see all the found jpegs. You can then move them to wherever you want or delete any duplicates. I'm not sure if the IMac
has a similar search feature. There is also a small program called Duplicate Cleaner you can find on Gizmos site for finding and deleting duplicate files and
it's free of course.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-duplicate-file-detector.htm#Duplicate-Cleaner

This post has been edited by jameson: 13 November 2011 - 07:15 AM

good ideas all, i will follow up on those once I swim out from under this mountain of STUFF, I have stuff, lol

duplicate cleaner, I'm assuming it just looks for files with the same name? So that if I renamed a picture and kept the original there would be multiple files after the renaming. I have a scanner that names pic some incomprehensible something and the scanner is enough to make me tear my hair out, it works good for a couple days then it comes up missing stuff and have to download again etc. a royal pain but these pictures are very important.

Sometimes I can see something with the scanner but if I try to open it with photo editing software it says not able to open. i do not understand, sigh.

Thanks for the tips - I guess my "thing" is more difficult because not everything works on each computer. In a few days hope to be caught up and will make a note of the results. Happy leaf raking among other things. Leaves never leave, they only come.


Edit:
Edited to remove unnecessary quote. ~ tg

I happily use Lightroom 3. It doesn't necessarily organize photographs, but if you upload all your photos to one folder, you can drop the folder into LR and catalog them into specific folders and whatnot. It's also a great editing software. It takes a little while to get used to and it's not free, but I don't think I could get buy without it now.
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/

Since the holidays are coming around it's likely to go on sale before or after. I often see random sales where it drops down to $100-150. If you're a student, you can get a great discount.