How can I speed up sorting and identifying large numbers of photos by subject for upload?
Asked 4/26/2023
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2 answers
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I shoot thousands of photos and need to organize them by the specific subject shown in each image (for example, a particular town hall, church, butterfly species, or a house at a specific address), not just broad categories like "building" or "butterfly." This is important for uploading to Wikimedia Commons, where files need to be grouped by what is actually depicted.
Manual sorting is very slow, especially when I also need to look up information about the subject. I do not have GPS in most older photos, though I am now recording GPS in EXIF for new shots. I’ve tried practical markers while shooting, such as photographing a map or using a hand shot between subjects to mark transitions.
Are there workflows, methods, or software tools that can make this kind of subject-based sorting faster and more reliable, especially when I need fairly specific identification rather than generic image-recognition labels?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
3y ago
2 Answers
1
Image recognition software is available but has several risks, as google found out, so you would need to either spend a lot of time training a machine learning image recognition system (which Google has done) or possibly initially uploading to Google Photos, letting them do it and vetting the results.
A reasonable possibility would be to use a note taking application on your phone that timestamps the entries and then use the timestamp to categorise your photos from the note. It would be nice if there was a voice to text option but there are many venues where talking is discouraged.
You can also look at extracting the GPS data (Lat/Long) e.g. with exiftool or as in this example and querying a service for what is at/near that location geopy provides the tools to do this but you may need to pay for the actual sevrice(s) queried.
Originally by user24712. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user24712
3y ago
0
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There isn’t a reliable fully automatic solution for the level of specificity you want. Generic image recognition may identify broad classes, but not consistently enough for exact subjects like a particular building or address unless you invest heavily in training and checking results.
The most practical workflow from the answers is to add structured notes while shooting, then match them to photos by time:
- Use a note-taking app on your phone with timestamps.
- Record each new subject/location as a short note; voice-to-text may help where practical.
- Match each note to the corresponding photos by capture time.
For newer images, GPS can also help:
- Extract EXIF latitude/longitude with a tool such as exiftool.
- Use reverse geocoding or location-query tools to suggest what is at or near that position.
- Treat this as an aid, not a final answer, since camera position may not equal subject position.
Your current in-camera markers (photo of a map, hand shot between subjects) are also sensible as manual separators. In short: combine timestamped notes, GPS lookup where available, and manual review. That is likely to be faster and more dependable than relying on image recognition alone.
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