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[BillyBoyBlue]

I decided to try MC to do a little house cleaning of my extensive photo collection and ran into the following issues:

I went to files, used the folder tree, left pane to find my main picture folder, then walked down to locate various sub folders.  Let's call the subfolder I want to work in Andy. I set to thumbnail view, see 40 thumbnails, so far great. Looking at these thumbnails as a group I see several I want to make a name change on. I look for that option and in thumbnail view it seems blocked out. Annoying. I switch to list view which while it shows indvidual thumbnails and you can select files you're now really using your memory to remember what files you want to rename, because I'm trying to put all the files into a more logical sequence so they play in a better order for a slide show and just for how they look (in a proper order) when viewing any sub folder from thumbnail view.


After doing the above I throught it might be better to just add some new sub folders (andy 1, 2, etc.) and move some files from the original Andy folder, to new folders I was about to make. While simple to do in Windows Explorer, (just click where ever you want on the tree and create a new folder, I don't see any such features in MC.

To do what I want, I had to exit MC, go to Windows Explorer, make the new folder. Going back to MC I looked for in vain any refresh button to refresh the tree so MC now at least would find the new empty folders I made. No luck. Now I'm getting frustrated. This does not support a good work flow and to do this endless back and forth would be far too slow and annoying working on any sizeable library. I have hundreds of thousands of photos.

Somebody tell me that's got to be an easier way using MC and what that is.  ?

[JimH]

http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Moving_Files

[rick.ca]

You're not likely to find any easier way while relying on the file system to organize your files. MC is a database (aka 'Library') of the files you've asked it to monitor. Once you've done that, the file locations have little bearing on the program's ability to manage them. It would be perfectly capable of doing so if the files were filed randomly.

For photos, it makes sense to keep the file names assigned by the camera and in folders by time period or import batch—so it remains clear where they came from. Then use MC to record information about the photos from which they may be organized—Albums, Events, Places, People, Keywords and/or whatever custom fields you may want to add. Decide which of those you're able and willing to maintain consistently, and how they will be used to organize and present the photos. MC includes many tools for the efficient tagging of such things (for photos, I find 'pane tagging' the most effective), making it far more efficient than a file manager. If there is valuable information content in your existing folder structure, that data can be extracted and stored in fields using Fill properties from filename.

If you want the photos to be stored in the file system in a more organized manner, MC can do that for you—using the information you've recorded and whatever file naming scheme you care to use.