Boredom is a great motivator. I had a few days with nothing to do so I decided to completely reorganize my photo files. With hundreds of thousands of images scattered across multiple drives and Lightroom catalogs, I thought it might be a good idea to finally deal with the duplicates and reorganize and consolidate the whole collection.

I purchased two external SSDs and started moving things around in an effort to consolidate. Gemini 2 and Excire were used to attack the dupes (after first backing up to Backblaze; an attached Thunderboldt raid; and to a Synology in the closet—just to be safe.)

After reducing the number of duplicate images I managed to break all the photos down to two Lightroom catalogs, one as the main working repository and a second as a syncing Lightroom catalog, which I would use to publish images on the web. The latter required that I rebuild all my online collections, which is about 95 percent done as of today.

I also needed to rebuild my WordPress photo index page, used to access the online collections, so I did that too, with new image collages and lots of big type so that it works on phones. There are just a few minor tweaks left to go.

So that’s how a little boredom one afternoon prompted a long, involved, but ultimately needed project.