Advice on cleaning up a big mess of pictures

[comfortablynumb]

Hi,
I won't bore you all with the details, but basically due to a flood in my house I had to tear apart my computer desk, storage devices, etc in a rush about a year ago.  I have tried a few methods on getting this mess cleaned up, but I haven't found anything that's worked great. 

I have about 50,000 pictures, and I probably need maybe 8,000, but the rest are duplicates.  When I had to tear apart the desk I scrambled to backup things and ended up with copies of copies, and through trying to fix this I've ended up with folders with duplicate pictures but they have the same name, etc. 

I am trying to find something that will take all these pictures and organize them into folders by the date the image was taken in a folder structure like year/month/day and then also rename the pictures to something like pic100_year-month-day and the date would be the date the image was taken.

I've tried picassa, aperture, and some duplicate image finders, but I can't get anywhere really solid so far.  Can anyone suggest a tool/tools on how to deal with this mess and it's a MAC I am using.

Thanks in advance!
Jake

[jimtron]

You can do this with Expression Media (formerly iView). Microsoft bought it, and now I think Phase One owns it. You can sort images by date, find duplicates, and rename files.

- Jim

[Roelof]

You could use some other tooling to find exact duplicates. I advise to use a MD5 hash code generator. You can generate a unique code for every image. Afterwards you can compare the codes to find (exact) replicates.
Images that are almost the same (only some minor changes) will generate a different hash so you wil not find them as replicates. So you will have to sort them out manualy and Expression Meda (or Media Pro nowadays) can be very helpfull there. There are all kinds of sorting mechanismns, temporaraly groupings, etc.

I advise to make first different smaller groups of images to sort out first. Groups you can handle in one day for example. These organizational groups you can manage in Expression Media also very good.

Roelof