Moving Forward

I did purchase the 2 TB external hard drive yesterday for $80 and at midnight, I started the copy job from my network folder that stores all of my music to the new external hard drive. I checked the status of the copying this morning at 6 AM. According to the time stamp, it took Windows XP 18 minutes to actually begin copying files because the "created date" for the earliest / oldest created folder is 12:18 AM. There were 129 folders created. I am not overly confident that it will be done copying when I get home tonight. There are at least 2700 folders that are in the source directory.

As I mentioned, I have an issue with duplicate files in my music folder. I ran some DOS batch files to get numbers that further clarify the issue.

2s = 39
3s = 1902
4s = 1165
5s = 516
6s = 217
7s = 74
@s = 2590
     6503 these are duplicate files that include duplicate .ini files, duplicate .jpg files
- 52627 this was my count yesterday - HOWEVER, it does not include .ini files or .jpg files.
  46124

Anyways, the conversion project for CDs is quite possibly going to be less important as Karen and I talked about scanning our photos in preparation for Megan's graduation party. We talked about how to approach it. I would like to scan the photos for an entire photo album. I haven't gone further than that to plot out what it will take to get all of our photos to digital. I don't even have a count for how many photos we have because they are all in bins in the storage room. I think what we should do is scan each photo, regardless of who is in the picture. I thought Karen made a good point in that we will be further ahead if we consider that in 3 short years, we will have Alex's graduation as well. That plays into the idea of scanning every photo we have and, somehow, tagging the .jpg file so that we can locate the appropriate picture. I don't really know if it is going to be practical to separate pictures into separate folders by who is in the photo. Say there's a folder for Karen, a folder for Megan, a folder for Alex, and a folder for me. The next picture to be scanned is a photo of Karen, Megan, and Alex. What folder does it go into? You're thinking, "Ah! Create a folder called "Family" and put the photo in that folder. That would work, temporarily. The next photo is of Karen, Megan, and Megan's friend. Does that go into "Family" or does a new folder get created called "Friends" to store that folder?

That's why I think it's probably going to come down to assigning tags to each photo. There can be a code assigned to each photo album, like P-1, P-2, etc. and there can be a folder for each photo album, but it's really going to come down to how well are the pictures tagged. I'm not really interested in spending a lot of time renaming files. I don't really give a damn if the file name is really odd or that it is impossible to say who is in the picture by looking at the file name. It's going to be so much easier to add the following 18 tags to a photo of Karen's family:

1. Alex
2. Karen
3. Megan
4. Paul
5. Louis
6. Jean
7. Barb
8. Danny
9. Anna
10. Dave
11. Chris
12. Emily
13. Rachel
14. Adam
15. Mark 
16. Susie
17. Jonathan
18. Tyler

I cannot imagine a file name that would have those 18 names in it. Then it would get even more complicated because there would be more than one picture with all of us in it and because you can't  have the same file name in the same folder, what then?

That's why I'm thinking I need to better research the freeware for adding tags to photos.