moving files

[yahyah9]

had elements 11 102,000 photos tagged and stored.   Computer crashed.   Took it to have fixed.....pictures wiped off.  Got pissed uploaded all pictures to Shutterfly hated it!!!!!!  Bought elements 18 installed....  copying all pictures from Shutterfly into my "D" Drive.  trying to re-tag and organize. 

Buying a 4tb external hard drive.......  If I move my pictures from the "D" drive to the HD am I going to have to "re-connect" all of those pictures?

Also, I know that I have duplicate photos everywhere.   If the photo has an image no starting with "B" does that mean that it is a duplicate.

Please help.....  I just ALL of my photos in one place so that I can start re-tagging.

Ready to start from scratch! but really don't know how.

[joanc30263381]

If you move the images from within the Organizer, all will be ok. It is only if you move the images outwith Organizer that it has a meltdown and you have to reconnect. I have just moved some 20000+ images within Organizer and it was very quick. I had previously moved them outside the Org to another drive and then had to manually reconnect them which is a pain. Fortunately, if you are ever in this situation, as soon as you reconnect one image within a folder, the rest of the images within that folder reconnect automatically which cuts down the work somewhat. Once I had done it the hard way, I realised I still did not have my images where I wanted them and discovered to move them within.

The folder structure inside the Org works just like File Explorer so you can drop and drag folders to their new location.

[MichelBParis]

yahyah9  wrote

had elements 11 102,000 photos tagged and stored.   Computer crashed.   Took it to have fixed.....pictures wiped off.  Got pissed uploaded all pictures to Shutterfly hated it!!!!!!  Bought elements 18 installed....  copying all pictures from Shutterfly into my "D" Drive.  trying to re-tag and organize. 

I understand you have used your Shutterfly photos and folders as a backup to recover the photofiles to your internal D: drive. You are about to try to start retagging. If you lost your files, you probably also lost your catalog, unless it was stored to a different drive? Reconnecting would mean the catalog is still available, which is not likely in your case. So, you may only have the option to re-import the files. If you had 'written metadata to files', tags and captions would be recovered, not albums, version sets, stacks...

Buying a 4tb external hard drive.......  If I move my pictures from the "D" drive to the HD am I going to have to "re-connect" all of those pictures?

I don't think that will make any difference, unless you have already started to tag files on your D: drive. Reconnecting means you have still your catalog.

Also, I know that I have duplicate photos everywhere.   If the photo has an image no starting with "B" does that mean that it is a duplicate.

Images file name starting with "B" in a backup folder? You don't say if you had made a full backup before the crash?

Anyway, if you have to re-import, the organizer should skip duplicates.

For the organizer, duplicates are mainly files with the same date_taken and size in kilobytes, not necessarily the same name.

Skipping duplicates is good, but the organizer does not know which item should be kept, it will only import the first one it finds.