Eating My Own Dog Food: File Cleanup

I'm in the process of cleaning up my files, as I mentioned last week. It's going a little better than I expected.

To filter duplicate files I'm using a free tool, Easy Duplicate Finder which is available at http://www.easyduplicatefinder.com/download.html.

It does a good job of matching possible duplicates using file size, file type, and file name checking. It doesn't apply any logic to removing them, which is a good thing - I'm forced to check each possible dupe as I go and delete (or not!).

The tricky bit is figuring out which folder structure I should be using in the Hub folder...going forward I will be hosting most of this information in the cloud so I can apply labels and metadata at that point, and surface these files in all sorts of funky ways, but right now I still need a place for my files to live.

I'm committed to the whole Single Source of Truth practice and so I'm forcing myself to use Windows Desktop Search, Vista folder bookmarks, and a central desktop folder root.

It's been a real question of discipline - I often find myself reverting to bad practices and trying to copy the same file in multiple places if I can't quite decide where it should go. Over the last couple of days I've started getting a little better at placing any particular file in a single place and adding shortcuts and bookmarks to it.

Cleaning Up Music Files

• I did a desktop search for *.mp in the root of the old c:\music folder
• I copied all the files which were the results of the search into a new, single folder called "cleanup"
• Then I did a duplicate file finder scan on that folder so it could clean it all up

 

• I deleted the duplicate files...and went from about 3,920 files and 12 gigs in the music folder to about 2,152 files and 8.9 gigs of music.

Then I foolishly decided to let iTunes manage the folder.

• I set the iTunes folder to be hub\music folder and made sure Create file with trackname was disabled as this was causing duplicate files all the time
• I added the cleanup folder to iTunes
• I allowed iTunes to consolidate the library which organized the files which renamed them and placed in the hub folder
• Now I had a lot of duplicate tracks, so I followed this advice to remove those:
• http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1579/how_to_remove_duplicate_files_from_your_itunes_media_library_

For some reason no matter what I do iTunes duplicates the files 2 to 4 times. As near as I can tell, it is doing this because it thinks the song could belong to multiple albums for that artist....Whatever the case, I am left with iTunes havoc and I am still puzzling out how to remove duplication in this folder without deleting original songs.

Thanks iTunes! Maybe it's not worth the bother.

Cleaning Up Photos and Videos

• I did a duplicate file clean on the photos and videos folder
• This is somewhat harder than managing music - as most cameras will tag a file with the same broad tag and then you copy 100 pictures labeled [Tag] 001, [Tag] 002, etc...
• It required lots of manual passes, and I made sure not to delete things I wasn't sure about
• I did some targeted searches using Windows Desktop search tool - looking for keywords and trying to merge things into broader folders
• In the end, I've gone from 2100 files (including 1102 duplicates) and 36 gigs of content to 998 files and 28.7 gigs of space.

Metadata is much more important for photos than for music files, because I can use them in many more ways (image editing, personal scrapbooks, social networking sites, websites).

Because an image can be used in many different places, it isn't easy to choose a single folder for a photo to live in. I've started experimenting with bulk insert into Picassa or similar so I can tag 'em. Also pondering adding del.icio.us to the Information Management plan since I am in the whole Cloud frame of mind.

How do you manage photos on your desktop, especially with metadata? Are there photo management tools you couldn't live without?