Before ImgArchive, I had a disorganised collection of Digital Images that have grown over time over a large number of external USB drives. I had backed up sets of images to other drives but lost track of which are the original's and which are the backups. As the file names generated by the camera are very generic made identifying images even harder.
The first task ImgArchive was able to do was to sort images into a set of date ordered folders. ImgArchive can take a disorganised set of disks and recursively scan the disks for all image files. This also includes RAW images. These images files are then organised into a set of date sorted set of folders with the image files contain within those folders. In addition, will only use one copy of a given image file duplicates are rejected.
I now have an organised collection of Digital Images.
ImgArchive is much more than a image organiser and de-duplicator. It is an environment in which you can manage and safeguard your images. built-in to ImgArchive is a Digital Vault. This vault automatically safeguards your images by maintaining a number of copies of the master images and only allows copies of these masters. Further to this, the images are fingerprinted. The is used for de-duplicating images and validating the images stored in the vault.
Finding images is always a problem, however ImgArchive provides a number of ways to locate images. Each image stored in the archive has metadata stored with the image enabling that image to be found by matching that data stored about that image. A simple example would be matching hash tags stored within the metadata. however much more information about an image is stored within the images metadata. The metadata is stored with a single metadata file.
When editing images it is always a bad idea to edit originals. Make copies of the originals and editing the copy is always a better option. ImgArchive will always provide a copy of the original for editing. This also applies to to versions of the original.
ImgArchive enables up to two finger printed backups of all images. That optionally makes three copies of each image. Having all the images finger printed using both CRC and SHA256 checksums help prevent silent data corruption. These are the errors that go unnoticed, without being detected by the disk firmware or the host operating system; these errors are known as silent data corruption.
For a more detailed description of ImgArchive visit the following sections.