A quick way to sort jpeg files

Question

A quick way to sort jpeg files

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this question but here goes. My Mac savvy neighbour helped me retrieve a bunch of pictures I accidentally deleted during an external hard drive back up using Data Rescue. The original library had about 17,000 pictures. During the retrieval, it somehow generated over 130,000 jpg files and in looking at them in Coverflow, I've discovered that some of these are just thumbnails of weird clips and some are actually the pictures. I've tried sorting them by file size because my original images are usually about 1 - 3mb but in randomly clicking on several of the 130,000+ jpgs, I actually do have images that are as large as 900mb to as small as 40kb. Is there a program which could scan this salvaged jpg folder and identify ONLY the original files (e.g.: by using the camera's meta tag data or something?) Right now, going through them one by one is going to take me forever.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.5), PC

Posted on Mar 1, 2009 10:54 AM

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Answer 1

red_menace

Level 6

17,030 points

Mar 1, 2009 1:32 PM in response to karentam6600000

If the items were from iPhoto or something like that, usually the thumbnails are of a certain size (such as 240x160), so a Spotlight query from the Finder may do the trick. From a Finder > Find… window, select Other… and enable attributes such as Pixel Height, Pixel Width, ISO speed, etc, then add the desired query items to the Finder search. There are also other Raw Query items that can be used, such as kMDItemAcquisitionMake = "Canon" to search for a particular camera manufacturer.

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Answer 2

Mar 1, 2009 1:38 PM in response to karentam6600000

You might want to post your question in the iPhoto forum. There are people there, especially Terence Devlin, who know about everything there is to know about photos.

If you don’t have iPhoto, it might be worth the $US80 to get it to help sort out the photos.

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Answer 3

Mar 1, 2009 1:50 PM in response to Bruce Etnyre

Thanks everyone for the advice. Yes, it was originally imported into iPhoto before I accidentally erased it and I've tried to re-import it again but it crashed because I was trying to import 130,000+ files. I do see about the right number of files in the new iPhoto library but I want to delete all of the non images from my hard drive as it is taking up a lot of space. I will post this question in the iPhoto forum per your suggestion and also try the finder option.

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