Merging Computer Files and Folders

[Brewtal66]

Hey Everyone,

I've done some searching around the interwebs but can't seem to find exactly what I'm looking for, so I figured I'd ask here.

I'm looking for a computer program that will merge computer folders and files for me, keeping one copy only. For example...I have a "pictures" folder with 100's of sub-folders, which all have their own pictures and even more subfolders. The problem is that I have several "pictures" folders(old computer, back up hard drive, new computer, etc.). I want to merge them all without losing any pictures and not having any duplicates.

The problem I'm running into, is say I have a folder called ABC. The first version might have pictures 1, 2, 3, and 4 in it. The second version might have those pictures, plus pictures 5 and 6. The programs I've found won't combine those pictures and clean it up.

I suppose I could just spend an afternoon and go through all of them...I was just being lazy. Any suggestions anybody has used in the past?

Thanks!

[Schwartz Perf]

Sounds like a pretty cool program if it's out there!

I don't have an easy trick to doing what you're trying to do.. just manually which sucks, lol.

-Dale

[out2kayak]

Something like:

Windows:
http://www.cockos.com/pathsync/
http://burpee.smccme.edu/studenthowtos/robocopy.htm
http://tour.winmerge.org/

via scripting, something like:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/10/08/easily-compare-two-folders-by-using-powershell.aspx

On Apple or other Unux oriented systems:
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/104185/how-do-you-compare-two-folders-and-copy-the-difference-to-a-third-folder


Thoughts?

[toy71camaro]

Other than a tool used to catalog your files (such as Lightroom) which would likely use a completely different file organization structure, I am not familiar with any tool to compare files AND subdirectories for said file.

Also you run into the possibility of two files having the same name. The "tool" would have to compare them to see if they were really different and know what to do in that situation. Time/Date stamp is helpful, but not always accurate.

That's asking a lot of a tool.

However, do you keep a backup of said pictures? if not, you should. Your computer's hard drive WILL crash. Guaranteed. Its just a matter of "when". Could be today, could be 20 years. But it WILL fail. Tools like Google's new Photo's app will monitor a parent folder and upload pictures to your Google account. It will automatically sort them by date, and not bother with duplicates (if same name). That might be an alternative option. From the Photos online you can choose to share them to people easily too.

[SSLance]

Here's what I did to clean up my wife's pictures. Every time she'd download the pictures from the camera to her PC, it would put them in a new folder and import all of the pictures from the camera over and over and over again. She ended up with over 9,000 duplicate pictures.

What I did was start a new folder for all of the pictures and then copy n pasted the picture files from each of her old folders into the new folder. When you do this, windows will find the duplicate files (pictures) and ask you what to do. By choosing to not copy the duplicate files you will get all of the unique new files (pictures) but not the duplicate ones.

It took me a whole evening to do this, but I culled her 11,000 picture files down to less than 2,000 unique individual picture files. I then set her up with a google drive folder and uploaded all of them to the cloud...just in case.

Once all of the pictures are in the one big folder, you can sort them by date, name, day taken, last modified or whatever and or sort them back out by subject if you'd like...but at least you won't have thousands of duplicate pictures to try to sort at the same time.

[Brewtal66]

Thanks guys! Sounds like the best and most fool proof plan is to do it manually. I'm sure it will go faster than I think, just a pain.