Family videos in chronological order

[BobFlangan]

I just joined the forum, so I hope this is the right place for this topic. One of the things I like to do is to play videos on our TV of pictures and videos we have taken of the family. Deciding what pictures and videos to include in a TV video is difficult, because at last count we have 11,041 files (48GB) with many back to 2005. This doesn't count the 2000+ my daughter and son have taken of their family this year.

So, being a heavy Excel user, I created the Picture and Video Assistant (PVA for short). It is a free product. It creates a list of all one's pictures and videos. It then randomly assigns them to video folder destinations. Then it will copy the files for the selected video folders to those folders. When it does this, it adds the year, month, day, and time to the front of the file name. This is a key step! When I import the files from the video folder into PicturesToExe, they end up in chronological order!!! I typically create 2-3 videos out of the 25+ video folders. The result is a unique sample of the many pictures and videos we have.

When creating PVA, I discovered that some of the files had the wrong date on them. It seems that editing a file changes the date, and Windows doesn't really keep a creation date. So, I added a feature to re-date files. And then obviously I discovered I had lots of duplicates, so I added features to find them. And then more and more features!

When I create a video for the TV, I have PVA copy about 3GB of files to each video destination folder. This is typically 400 or so files. This results in a video that lasts for about an hour and easily fits on a DVD. When we play, the ones who enjoy the videos the most are the grandkids, who are the stars of most of the videos and pictures!

Again, PVA is free. It works only on Windows PCs and one must have Microsoft Excel. If you have a Mac, then you would need to either be a closet PC user or run something like Parallels on the Mac.

If you have any suggestions on features to add to PVA, let me know!

[Ken Cox]

Bob

I moved the thread to software

ken

[trailertrash]

Of course, " Memories don't come in chronological order ".