Locate multiple missing folders

[slinberg]

I have a very large set of images (about 1'',''' in 2,''' folders nested two levels deep) that I am in the slow process of importing, one folder at time, into LR and tagging with keywords.

I did the first 1'' folders or so with the library on a local drive and the actual images on a network drive. I decided to copy the images to a local drive so I could continue and have the process be faster, so I did that... spent a few hours and moved the 1'' gigs of images to a local drive. Then I took the network folder offline and re-opened the LR library.

I now need to tell it that the images have moved. I see that I can right-click on each folder one at a time to tell it where the folder now lives, but this will be a very painful process if I have to do this each time for every folder. How do I tell LR that all of the images have moved to a new location with the same relative structure?

Example: I had this:

/Volumes/A/images/a/a/
/Volumes/A/images/a/b/
/Volumes/A/images/b/c/
/Volumes/A/images/b/d/

These folders appear in the "folder" list as a, b, c, and d. (Actually there are about 1'' of these, each containing 2'-5' images, and the names are more complicated, but that is the structure.)

After the move, I now have this:

/Volumes/B/images/a/a/
/Volumes/B/images/a/b/
/Volumes/B/images/b/c/
/Volumes/B/images/b/d/

I want to tell LR that all of the folders have moved from volume A to volume B, without explicitly doing so for each folder. Doing one does not locate its neighbors, and since I am importing one folder at a time, I can't just drop the 1'','''-image library on LR.

How can I do this?

Thanks for any tips.

My system: Mac G5/2.' dual, OSX 1'.4.11, 2.5gb RAM, lots of local drive space, external NAS

 

[DonRicklin]

Right/Control-click on one of the Red Parent folder listings. Do Locate Missing Folder. Navigate to that new folder position and choose it. All should be found.



Don

 

[slinberg]

Right/Control-click on one of the Red Parent folder listings. Do Locate Missing Folder. Navigate to that new folder position and choose it. All should be found.



Don

That only finds the one I clicked on. These directories have no common parent, it's a long list of parallel directories. I can find each individual folder, but there doesn't seem to be a way to select all of the folders and say "find them all, given that the hierarchy is the same but the volume has changed."

I ended up building a more recent version of sqlite3 than ships with OSX by default (3.1.3, I built 3.5.6 from source) and used that to update the paths for all of the images and folders, and luckily that worked (yes, I backed up the library file before hacking it). The queries were:

update AgFolderTagInfo set absolutePath = replace(absolutePath, 'OLD-PATH-FRAGMENT', 'NEW-PATH-FRAGMENT');
update Adobe_imageFiles set absolutePath = replace(absolutePath, 'OLD-PATH-FRAGMENT', 'NEW-PATH-FRAGMENT');

...where OLD-PATH-FRAGMENT and NEW-PATH-FRAGMENT were safely unique bits of the old and new paths, respectively.

Drastic, but it worked.

It's cool that Lightroom uses sqlite under the hood. I didn't know that when I bought it. I know it's way unsupported to be tinkering with it like this, but I'm a programmer and I didn't see another way to do what needed doing here.

Thanks for your response,

Steve

 

[Ian Farlow]

Interesting solution. Thanks for posting this.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Very cool solution.

The general solution is more of a preventative measure - show LR the highest common folder (root in this case) before moving, so that you can relink a single folder at the other end. Love your workaround though Steve!

 

[slinberg]

Hmm - so if I threw a sample image in the library parallel to all of the folders and told LR to include that, it would adjust all of the adjacent folders since they share the same parent? I'll try that on the way back and see if it works.

(I can't just import the parent folder as one big thing in this case because there are over 1'',''' images among all of the folders and I don't want to import them all at once... I'm going folder-by-folder and keywording them as I go, in small bites.)

- Steve

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Yes, that's right Steve. A single image at the root level (which you can delete once LR's seen it) will allow LR to see the full hierarchy. Not sure if it'll work where the files are already missing, but it's worth a shot. It's certainly a good preventative measure for the future, and any single folders you import in future will automatically find their place in that hierarchy.

 

[DonRicklin]

I just did this for a friend who complained he had his images all over the place and wanted to get them all under 'My Pictures'. Well we started with the one image in the root My Pictures and got that folder into LR. Then drag and Dropped, in LR, ant folders that were somewhere else.

He ended up still having one folder showing Red, (that wasn't before) so we did the 'Locate Folder' and chose 'My Pictures' and Voila!

Don