Beautiful Backup 2 Pro for Android

This is honestly a hidden gem in the app store. There are so few options are there that does what this app does. I have an insane amount of family photos that needed organizing. This saved me so much time. It’s too bad updates are not very fequent. I’d love to see this continued to be improved.

I must start out with saying that the User Interface just plain outright leaves a lot to be desired. Otherwise, if you are not a fan of a huge bloated cataloging / management application for Photos and Videos, you don’t need a combination editor and processor, you just want to organise your images in a straight forward drop dead simple directory structure, then this is the application you want. To that point, while other similar products have come, gone, and come back even, fizzled, made grandiose promises only to majorly disappoint, or have been coming “soon” since 2011 and before, this application combines a feature set that is ready to do things now. Useful, utility operations, housekeeping, sorting, in a way that isn’t bogged down and requires a proprietary client to browse, this is what you want. Areas that need work: Makes choices based on variable options without user control. It’s poor form to assume something is better than something else. Let the user decide the specifics of which to use and when to use it. Understandably, the author has chosen to maintain a strict non-destructive workflow, but it would be so much more flexible if it would allow to remove images from the source directory if they are processed by the application. This would allow the user to see what is left and refine further. Of course, these options should be off by default, and with ample warnings when enabled. Also, a great addition would be logging of changes. With, or without source file deletion, a simple log in csv format would also provide some idea of how things are being processed and how to better prepare source data. The product title is not really indicative of what the product does, and some of the terminology/verbiage is a bit odd from a North American prespective. Would be nice to start at the main option screen before having to pick a library folder to work with, to be able to pick / set options and save sets of options as a re-loadable profile. Duplicate Detection is mediocre at best. Needs the ability -not- process documents based on certain criteria as well as doing so. That is, to leave them behind in the source directory, not introduced to the library being built. This would allow the user to take steps to further refine settings or a way to filter out non-conforming images from the desired result.

seemed promising, i have 32 gb RAMon my Android .the only app i have seen that drains all of it and causes the Android to freeze. good concept but poor interface… and yes offcourse does not work

I had been scouring the internet for a product that would do just what this one does. I must admit that I was nervous because 16 years of family memories are at stake. Like many users my file management discipline is sadly lacking and my family photographs are spread over 6 disk drives and there are many duplicates. I tried to map out a plan. First I tested this application. I gathered approximately 20GB photos and put them in a single folder. Some of the photos were already in folders of their own. I ran the application and it created a set of directories by year/month/date. I compared the target folder size to the source folder size. It was close but not exact. When I examined the folders I could see more duplicates than the application found which was troubling. I decided to use another application to find duplicates and it did a vey good job. My workflow was first find duplicates as I added more and more pictures and then run Beautiful Backup 2 (BB2). My final step would be to migrate the data to my Synology NAS. When I opened the user interface for the first time I was impressed. This looked ready for prime time. I ran more tests and finally I decided that it should be close enough. Besides I have copies of the photographs of course. I have around 70GB of photographs spread over 16 years (about 22,000 files). I am now at the stage that I feel comfortable proceeding. It appears to me that the main functionality is there (I’ll know soon) but there are still some areas that ned work. For example, duplicates are not always the exact same size. BB2 does not catch these. Other duplicate applications do. So it’s not perfect however if it automates the directory structure for me, that’s a huge start and worth the price of admission.