Find every image and copy to a single directory?

Since I moved house my image filing has got out of hand. i have been too busy to be neat so now I have images, and halfa**ed backups, and downloaded from Cf RAW's, etc all over my various hard drives. Is there an application that will find them all and dump them in a single directory for me to then sort or even sort auto stylee ... or something that will do a similar job so I don't have to hunt around manually?

Windows, right? use Search for files or folders of your image types in "My Computer" or "All hard drives", then drag 'em all to your intended destination directory.

Cheers ... I tried that and found 54,000 or so files, of which a large number were system or application related images. Also, doesn't keep 'em all in folders. I don't just want a lump of 30,000 or so individual files but rather to keep them in their existing folders too if possible.

Use the advanced search to only search for images over a certain size? Over 300K should do the trick.

So you want to copy them, but retain the folder structure they're in? How much of the folder structure do you want to keep? Just the last subdirectory? All the way from the root?

If your files still have Canon's naming format, you could search for IMG_????.*. If you've been renaming them with some non-consistent names, you'll need to do as Pete suggests.

One other possibility (which you'll need to perform for each drive), if you have a file name pattern you can use, would be to open a command window and, from the root of each drive, run "XCOPY filepattern [Dest_drive] /s -Y" The /s switch tells it to copy the directory structure; the /-Y says to prompt before overwriting anything. You could also use the "XCOPY pattern > files.txt" to create a list of the files that would be copied, then edit that into a batch file to copy the ones you want.

Cheers fella's ... I will Glen Ponder on the options. Seems no easy solution and the best solution is just go through drive by drive (there are five) and do manual a copy/replace (when needed) to a single folder on a drive. That will retain folders but get rid of dupes and I will also get to keep all shots rather than just those over a certain random limit. Then I will need to spend another half day getting rid of the crap ... that should leave me 3-4 decent shots at least and then I can start my backup routines and proper filing again.

Or just junk all your files and start taking good shots from now on?

you could also leave them all in their respective directories and then make a new folder that has a shortcut to each file. that way you can look in one folder for the image you are wanting but it would still open the original that is in the other directory/folder.

Condyk, what I would do is download the trial version of Lightroom. Lightroom has some great organization capabilities. You can have it search for all of your pictures and reorganize them based on date they were taken. You can pick from a variety of folder structures of how you would like to store them. It uses the EXIF metadata to determine when the picture was taken, so it doesn't matter where the picture is located, it will put it in the right spot. The trial version lasts 30 days, which should be plenty of time to organize your pictures.

Just beware, Lightroom is slow as molasses in importing but once imported, your files will be organized correctly.

Also, I would not suggest putting 54K images into a single folder. Browsing to the folder would take excruciatingly long.

I don't like Lightroom to be honest even tho' I got a free copy as an ex RawShooter user. I won't put 54k's of files in one folder ... don't worry about that

neil, i don't want to use the shortcut approach. I want to have them in a single folder with sub folders and have my CF's and SD's auto store there too on import and then have an auto backup routine. This is what i used to have so just need to retreive the situation and get back on track.

Dave,

Have you tried iView media Pro? - It's now 'owned' by My Gates and called Microsoft Expression Media but it's a good cataloguing program and much faster than Lightroom (I don't think anything is slower...).
It doesn't do raw conversion, just catalogues your image files (and a load more I expect)

You can get a 60 day trial.

http://www.iview-multimedia.com/


I put all my images in one folder 'Pictures' and have sub-folders for camera model ('20D' etc.), then sub-folders for 'year', and then a folder with the date and basic description - '2007-12-14 Santa Porno Shoot' - (for instance )

When you use LR or iView Media Pro you then use 'keywords' or 'tags' etc. to find images across the whold structure - Easy!

kevin_c wrote in post #4502476
'2007-12-14 Santa Porno Shoot'....

TJ

TeeJay wrote in post #4502496


TJ

SORRY! - Should have been Santa PROMO Shoot!!

kevin_c wrote in post #4502508
SORRY! - Should have been Santa PROMO Shoot!!

That could possibly be the best typo of the year!