I wrote a huge blogpost describing my trial-and-error approaches for 20 years and why PhotoStructure is a huge breath of fresh air. Hopefully it won’t be considered to be a spam link 
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Fantastic post! Reading it is like re-living some of my years.
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Great post mnaoumov, it’s certainly similar to my story with my photo library. Good job!
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Great post! Here are some other tools that I have found useful for managing my photo collection:
“Remove Empty Directories” by Jonas John. Sometimes when duplicate photos are deleted, the empty folder remains behind. This open source tool quickly finds and deletes all those empty folders.
“DoubleKiller” by Big Bang Enterprises. The free version works great: it can identify duplicate files via name, size, date, hash, or any combination of those. Doesn’t find visually similar images though.
“Duplicate Photo Finder” by Firmtools. This program looks for visually similar images, and presents them side by side so you can choose which one to keep.
“cPicture” from cpicture.thecloudsite.net. This app does a ton of stuff, but I mainly use it just to scan for corrupt jpgs. I bought the paid version, it’s worth it.
“EXIF Date Changer” by Rellik software. Sometimes you’ll have a group of pictures with the wrong date or time. This tool can easily adjust that in batches. Free version works great for me but you can get a bunch of extra features with the paid version.
“ExifTool” and “ExifToolGUI”. The best app for editing/viewing photo metadata.
For backing up my pictures: I use (and recommend) Backblaze (for cloud backups), Microsoft Synctoy (for local usb backups), and Beyond Compare (scooter software) for backup verification.
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Love this!
+1 on Exiftool, it’s incredible. I used it to sort all my photos by date before i found photostructure
Also, for de-duping, I recently found czkawka and I am a huge fan. It’s open-source, free, and crazy fast. Used it to deduplicate > 70GB’s of photos and it was easy-peasy. (This just finds files that are exact duplicates, by the way).
Digikam, additionally, has a very useful deduplication/duplicate-identification tool, which lets you find matches based on a “similarity” threshold. That’s been great for going back to images I edited slightly 3 years ago and picking the best edit so i can save some drive space.
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