Software to find and move only Black and White Photos

Hello, i just completed a scanning project where all physical photos from my childhood home were scanned onto my computer, 6000 pictures.

Now im looking for software that can find (and hopefully move) only the black and white photos in my new scanned folders.

Ive done several searches and saw a lot of software that will find duplicate photos, but none that will find only black and white photos.

Can anyone recommend a software that will scan specific folders for black and white photos only?

BTW, I just downloaded Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder, as recommended by PC World, but if anyone has better suggestions for finding (and moving/removing) duplicate photos, please feel free to include those as well, but the B&W finder is most important.

Thanks very much.

Paul

Not sure if this is quite what you're looking for, but Google Photos can distinguish (fairly well) black and white photos from color photos. If you have your photos upload to Google Photos, just do a search for "black and white" and it will return those results. Then you can select the ones that you want to download and sort things that way.

Thanks for the tip. I am looking for a more robust client side software, but will give this a try a see how it works out...

I assume you want to identify both desaturated 'color' photos, and true gray scale images.

My original thought was to search Exif data that would identify one type of B&W photo, the other, or both. I was thinking that ACDSee which can do complex searches on almost any EXIF field could be useful.

I did a little research, and I personally am not certain that sort of info is stored in standardized fields so that any old search utility could find it. But then, I am not an expert.

I looked at the standard EXIF tags HERE, and I didn't see anything that jumped out at me that could identify any sort of B&W image, let alone both. It MIGHT be there, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to recognize it. Hopefully, some more knowledgeable people will be able to identify something.

I'm thinking at this point, if there ARE any utilities that can find B&W photos, it would be restricted to photos that utility created and which stored that information in its own database. And this is something anyone could replicate with any management software by adding a keyword/tag/category called "B&W" and tagging any B&W photos you find with that keyword.

I hope I'm wrong, because I could see where the ability to identify B&W images outside of the Keyword/Tagging function would be useful.

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You can use ImageMagick like this

convert image.jpg -colorspace HSL -channel g -separate +channel -format "%[fx:mean]" info:

This will return a saturation mean value for image (0 being strict grayscale image) so you could filter them by some threshold of your choice (as they can have some slight tint).

In windows 10

Open folder where all the files are.

View mode details.

Right mouse click on details bar - > select more

Add Bit depth with left mouse click.

Now arrange by bit depth if BW photos are in grayscale mode.

Select what you need.

otto k said:

You can use ImageMagick like this

convert image.jpg -colorspace HSL -channel g -separate +channel -format "%[fx:mean]" info:

This will return a saturation mean value for image (0 being strict grayscale image) so you could filter them by some threshold of your choice (as they can have some slight tint).

Click to expand...

A excellent Idea! But It will still require finding the photos manually, and changing them. It will make future searches easier, but that first one is still gonna be a bear! (and it wouldn't find any desaturated raw images if I read your comments correctly)

No changing and finding needed. For example, for following images desaturated in gimp:

• 08130001.JPG - original
• 08130001x100.JPG - fully desaturated
• 08130001x60.JPG - 60% desaturated
• 08130001x80.JPG - 80% desaturated
• 08130001x90.JPG - 90% desaturated

Following command

convert 08130001*.JPG -colorspace HSL -channel g -separate +channel -format "%f %[fx:mean]" info:

Gives:

08130001.JPG 0.588191
08130001x100.JPG 0
08130001x60.JPG 0.240851
08130001x80.JPG 0.130937
08130001x90.JPG 0.0656869

So, I guess setting the threshold at 0.1 would do nicely (80% desaturated looks very grayscale to me

If having more complex needs:

find -iname "08130001*" -exec echo -n "{} - " \; -exec convert {} -colorspace HSL -channel g -separate +channel -format "%[fx:mean]" info: \;

This is all under Linux/bash but the same applies to windows version of ImageMagick as well.

EDIT - Just to make clear for OP this does not in fact convert any of the images, they remain the same on disk, conversion is only in memory for the filtering need.

I would assume you could do this in Lightroom, by choosing to filter images by the metadata tag "grayscale"?

Thanks for the info. I have about 2000 B&W scans, some as early as the 1930's, so caution is key. Ill write back if i find anything useful.

Wow, if this works, it could be the quickest way yet. Thanks for the info, ill certainly give it a try

Interesting, I use Capture One 9.2 and Corel Paint Shop Pro X9, but will check there. Thanks for the tip

Thanks for the edit, ill have to experiment with a few tonmaster the process

Several have suggested image magick, ill give it a try

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The google approach didn't work for me.

Tried the Windows 10 Bit depth approach - because all the photos were scanned, they all have a 24 bit depth. So this approach won't work for me

PaulPhilly said:

Tried the Windows 10 Bit depth approach - because all the photos were scanned, they all have a 24 bit depth. So this approach won't work for me

Click to expand...

There is no such thing as 24-bit greyscale.

So basically they're color scans of BW prints. With no exif.

On macOS there's an application called "Deep" by Ironic Software that constructs color palettes of images on your machine, and then allows searching by color. Since even an image with some color is gonna have black and white, possibly, it's not perfect, but it might get you a head start. There might be similar software on other platforms.