Moving photos between folders

[becksnyc]

Lightroom Version Number

LrC 9.3

Operating System

1. Windows 10

On your good advice @clee01l I am organizing with collections and dispensing with folders for my moth taxonomy project.
As I drag & drop photos from Windows 10 sub-folders back into my 2020 folder WITHIN LrC (& deleting the unused folders), I keep getting the message "File already exists at the destination."
So, I used a dupe finder app to search my "Insect" folders & sub-folders for duplicates and deleted ALL duplicates (all two of them). Apparently Lightroom, or more likely Windows, is creating duplicates of a few of the photos out of each large batch that I'm moving.
I think it might have to do with a lag in Windows refreshing the folders.
If anyone has experienced and solved this, I'd love to hear it. Currently I am searching for the duplicates by name, deleting the dupe then synchronizing the LrC folders. Again & again & again.
*sigh*

 

[becksnyc]

On your good advice @clee01l I am organizing with collections and dispensing with folders for my moth taxonomy project.
As I drag & drop photos from Windows 10 sub-folders back into my 2020 folder WITHIN LrC (& deleting the unused folders), I keep getting the message "File already exists at the destination."
So, I used a dupe finder app to search my "Insect" folders & sub-folders for duplicates and deleted ALL duplicates (all two of them). Apparently Lightroom, or more likely Windows, is creating duplicates of a few of the photos out of each large batch that I'm moving.
I think it might have to do with a lag in Windows refreshing the folders.
If anyone has experienced and solved this, I'd love to hear it. Currently I am searching for the duplicates by name, deleting the dupe then synchronizing the LrC folders. Again & again & again.
*sigh*

To add to the fun, I just learned that, after deleting the "duplicate," the file no longer exists in the folder Lightroom said it already existed in. (Replicated several times).

 

[becksnyc]

To add to the fun, I just learned that, after deleting the "duplicate," the file no longer exists in the folder Lightroom said it already existed in. (Replicated several times).

BTW, I have no duplicate file names in my entire catalog, due to renaming on import YY/MM/DY/Hr/Min/Sec_originalfilename

 

[becksnyc]

BTW, I have no duplicate file names in my entire catalog, due to renaming on import YY/MM/DY/Hr/Min/Sec_originalfilename

It's interesting. I just tried to drag 4 photos of a "Snowy Dart" moth from my stupid sub-folder "Darts" back into my 2020 photos folder. Once again, I got "This file already exists in the destination folder." It did not exist in the destination folder, because I just did a duplicate search which turned up zero duplicates in the folders I'm moving files around in within lightroom. (I had also just synchronized, just in case).
When I go to Windows Explorer and search for the file name "20200720-23-23-29.JPG" it does, indeed, exist in both places. However, one file 6.65 MB and the other is 6.66 MB. One is landscape and the other is portrait orientation. Also, one has tags and the other does not. Keywording was done before moving from main to subfolder. (Moving photos to sub-folders was my, once again, hairbrained way of saying, "Okay, I'm done with this photo, now it can reside within an easily visible taxonomical structure." Uh-uh, nope, did not work. Don't say I told you so, Cletus. ;-)

 

[becksnyc]

I might also add, the more files I move, the higher percentage say "already exist." 1 out of 5, 10+ out of 100 & so on.

 

[clee01l]

On your good advice @clee01l I am organizing with collections and dispensing with folders for my moth taxonomy project.
As I drag & drop photos from Windows 10 sub-folders back into my 2020 folder WITHIN LrC (& deleting the unused folders), I keep getting the message "File already exists at the destination."
So, I used a dupe finder app to search my "Insect" folders & sub-folders for duplicates and deleted ALL duplicates (all two of them). Apparently Lightroom, or more likely Windows, is creating duplicates of a few of the photos out of each large batch that I'm moving.
I think it might have to do with a lag in Windows refreshing the folders.
If anyone has experienced and solved this, I'd love to hear it. Currently I am searching for the duplicates by name, deleting the dupe then synchronizing the LrC folders. Again & again & again.
*sigh*

Lightroom will not duplicate files. It will let you import the same file twice if you don’t check the “Don’t import Suspected Duplicates”

It sounds like you have reimported sever important files.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[becksnyc]

"Don't import suspected duplicates" is ALWAYS checked when I import. Learned the hard way years ago.
Besides, I mentioned that I had just checked the folders with a duplicate search app, right before moving photos between them within Lightroom.
The first few times I got the error message, I tried to synchronize folders. I stopped that and and am just putting suspected duplicates in a folder to deal with all at once.
I've been working on this all day, converting folders to collections. I notice that the longer groups of photos remain selected before I click & drag, the less likely for the error message. And, if I select and drag one at a time into the new folder, I don't get the message. EVER. But that's just insane.

 

[becksnyc]

"Don't import suspected duplicates" is ALWAYS checked when I import. Learned the hard way years ago.
Besides, I mentioned that I had just checked the folders with a duplicate search app, right before moving photos between them within Lightroom.
The first few times I got the error message, I tried to synchronize folders. I stopped that and and am just putting suspected duplicates in a folder to deal with all at once.
I've been working on this all day, converting folders to collections. I notice that the longer groups of photos remain selected before I click & drag, the less likely for the error message. And, if I select and drag one at a time into the new folder, I don't get the message. EVER. But that's just insane.

I changed the parameters on my duplicates search to look for same name only. Voila!
Now I have to figure out how this is happening.
Thanks

 

[Jim Wilde]

I've got to ask the question....what are you trying to do? It sounds as though you're trying to dump all your photos into a single folder? If that's correct, why would you want to do that? I may be missing something, but I see no advantage in doing that.

 

[becksnyc]

I've got to ask the question....what are you trying to do? It sounds as though you're trying to dump all your photos into a single folder? If that's correct, why would you want to do that? I may be missing something, but I see no advantage in doing that.

I've always followed a strict folder organization, divided by years, then subdivided by year/events. I shoot about 3000 pics a year; I'm not a pro. This moth survey has added half that in a just a few months.
I thought that folders which reflected the taxonomical structure of Lepidoptera would help me visualize the classification structure. So as I finished editing & tagging, I'd drop the photos in the appropriate species folder.
More experienced users suggested using collections instead, and I saw advantages to that, so began to migrate from folders to collections. The insect related photos will go back into Pictures/Naturalist/Insects/Lepidoptera. So yes, I'm dumping them back into a folder, but only of butterflies & moths.

 

[Jim Wilde]

I do get the "migration" from folders to collections for categorisation purposes, but that really means for existing images you can simply leave them where they are and start using collections instead. For new images, use a simple date-based folder structure (no user effort needed, let LrC do that for you), you can even leave the folders panel collapsed once you have the images categorised using collections/keywords, etc.

Other than the "tidiness" feeling, reorganising an existing folder structure into a different one (which you then plan to basically ignore) seems like wasted effort to me, not to mention the issues you are running into while trying to do that. However, I have to admit that I did something similar many years ago, but I left the original named folders alone until I had things working the way I wanted, but then the OCD in me eventually pushed me to reorganise those named folders into the same date-based system that the rest of my images are stored in.

 

[becksnyc]

I do get the "migration" from folders to collections for categorisation purposes, but that really means for existing images you can simply leave them where they are and start using collections instead. For new images, use a simple date-based folder structure (no user effort needed, let LrC do that for you), you can even leave the folders panel collapsed once you have the images categorised using collections/keywords, etc.

Other than the "tidiness" feeling, reorganising an existing folder structure into a different one (which you then plan to basically ignore) seems like wasted effort to me, not to mention the issues you are running into while trying to do that. However, I have to admit that I did something similar many years ago, but I left the original named folders alone until I had things working the way I wanted, but then the OCD in me eventually pushed me to reorganise those named folders into the same date-based system that the rest of my images are stored in.

Yes, that had been my mode of operation for years. Import and leave things where they are, use keywords & collections to organize.
The OCD kicked in when staring at a folder with 1300 moth photos and realizing I know nothing about moths to put them in order!
It all boiled down to either organizing them in folders OR in collections, because I can't keep up with both. Now I just need to make a collection for "Not in a Collection" so I know what still needs identification. That'll be easy, right?

 

[becksnyc]

"Don't import suspected duplicates" is ALWAYS checked when I import. Learned the hard way years ago.
Besides, I mentioned that I had just checked the folders with a duplicate search app, right before moving photos between them within Lightroom.
The first few times I got the error message, I tried to synchronize folders. I stopped that and and am just putting suspected duplicates in a folder to deal with all at once.
I've been working on this all day, converting folders to collections. I notice that the longer groups of photos remain selected before I click & drag, the less likely for the error message. And, if I select and drag one at a time into the new folder, I don't get the message. EVER. But that's just insane.

In case anyone else runs into this issue, I discovered the cause of the imported duplicates:
After I select "Import" (left panel), LrC on my computer is slow to filter out suspected duplicates. If I hit "Import" (right panel) before it's done eliminating photos that have already been imported, they will re-import. I was in the process of manually checking for photos that I remembered importing---they were there---I got interrupted by a call and when I came back, they were gone.
Lesson learned.