P: Moving folders with photos to other disk wich contains similar folders but different photos

Report · May 10, 2022

Hi,

I shoot photos mainly with my full frame camera and also make snapshots with my phone. I have a disk for editing the photos (SSD F:) and an archive disk (NAS P:). On both drives I have a directory tree like \202x\2021\2021-01-01 (decennium\year\day). Several times a week I copy the photos of my CF-Express card to my F-drive, edit the photos and move them to my P-drive.

So far so good. About 3 times a year I copy the photos from my phone to the F-drive, edit the photos and want to move all the folders to my archive disk P:.

Here's the problem. Many folders already exist on the P-drive because of the full frame photos. For every existing folder I get a message saying: A folder named <foldername> already exists at this location and it won't copy the photos from the source although these photos don't exsist on the P-drive. Therefore, I have to copy the photos manually to the correct folder on the P-drive. That mostly is a hell of a job.

Idea. When moving folders to a location that contain identical foldernames, move the photos of the source folder to the exising destination folder. If a photo already exists, ask the user if the photo in the destination folder should be overwritten or if the moving of the photo in the source folder should be skipped. When all photos of the source folder are moved, leaving the source folder empyt, ik can be removed. Also ask the user if the choice he made should be repeated in similar cases.

There are numerous programs that work in the way described here. I was amazed that LRC didn't work this way.

Report · May 12, 2022

What I do to copy files to my network storage is copying them through the finder or in windows explorer. After I copy the folders to the Network Storage, I check if they have the same size and move the local folder to the trash bin.

Lightroom will indicate that it lost the files, and I can select the new location on the network storage.

When I have a secondary folder with images, I add a .2 and select those for the extra images.

In your case, I would create a folder without the "-" so 20210101, and for the extra files, I would add .2 20210101.2 you know it is the same date but extra files.

But I often move the files when all my images are imported into Lightroom.

Hope this helps.