I wrote a tool to organize the massive amount of photos, screenshots, and images I've amassed over the years. It works great and brought back a lot of nostalgia!

Until I work in image upload to this site, it's going to be tough to have images in posts. For now. But if you can use your imagination.

Imagine if you will... A guy in his early twenties, at about the turn of the century, 2001-2002. He's working a good job. He has some money. He likes photography and he even has a film camera. All the sudden, tech companies, particularly camera companies, decide to bestow onto an unexpecting populace, the amazing technology of digital cameras.

The same guy has computers and gigabytes worth of hard drives, and also technical prowess. He decides to invest in a "digital" "camera". (End third person, it's me :D) It's amazing! 100 pics of the baseball field at a Phillies game with literally nothing going on and hardly any difference between them?  I've got those. Blurry pics alone in my room with Pepsi cans littering the place? Got those as well. Then, also with your vivid imagination, imagine some years later, when phone companies decide that they need to have cameras as well! And cameras that start to take photos that actually resemble what you think are in frame when you press the shutter.  Selfies? Hundreds. Pics of the inside of my pocket? Yep.

Without any desire to curate any of the collection at any time even up to 20 years later, I have amassed a huge collection where about 5% of the photos are any good.

Now, this tool won't help with throwing away bad ones. I mean, they also may be in the "they're so bad they're good" category. But what it will (and did) help with, is getting them all in one place.

I've had a folder on every computer I've had, c:\Jason, where images of these types would get dumped. And then I would get new computers, I would use an external drive to back them up and bring some over, use them in websites. What I thought might have happened is I created a few copies of every file. But alas that was not the case. It turns out I am pretty good about not mindlessly copying gigs of images to multiple locations! When I ran my tool there was hardly any difference in what it read vs. what it wrote, about 14 GB for each. Mind you, this doesn't include the 440 GB of raw DSLR photos I have.

So after 20 years of backing up my various phones and cameras to an external drive and keeping it around forever, I've ended up with 14 GB of photos. Which isn't too bad since it's about 10,500 photos. But they're all in separate folders and various levels of nesting, different folder names, etc. That's where imgorg comes in.

Since Google Drive has been offering 1 TB for $10 a month, then upped to 2 TB for the same price, that has been where everything has been backed up. And now a lot of them are in a bucket in my cloud storage in Google AppEngine, which is where this site is now hosted as of this week. I ran my tool and Google Drive is now syncing the results of it. 

I'll save you the technical babble, but if you want it is pretty detailed on my github page. However, just know that I'm very happy with this tool. It's kinda fast (14 GB read, organized and deleted in 1.5 minutes). I plan to add some image conversion stuff, to take care of my BMP problem.

Enjoy! It's made me also have to go through decades worth of photos and see all of my family in a much younger state. I do plan on having images on here again, so it will be more colorful :D Until then, enjoy the gray. I know I have to live with gray in more aspects than just this website ;)