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[6233638]

Is there a way to actually rename folders?

I'm wanting to add [Year] to the start of them, but if the directory changes, MC18 just wants to move the files instead. This would be fine, but I like to keep a copy of the album art as folder.jpg in there as I spend the time to either find a good high resolution cover, spend the time fixing up the best one that I can find, or scanning it in myself, so just in case something overwrites the embedded art, I still have a copy. A number of digital download albums have been coming with a PDF booklet as well, which I like to keep in the same folder.

When MC18 is moving files rather than simply renaming the directory, I'm left with the files spread out over multiple directories.

[jmone]

As far as I know, the only way you can do it is to:
- In MC use the "Update database to point to new locate n(no file rename, move, or copy)" option in Rename, Move, & Copy
- In Windows Explorer then rename the directory to match

[whatsup]

i have been renaming files for weeks with mc open but usinge windows explorer to rename with no issues, mc picks up the rename without moving anything.......

[6233638]

Thanks, but I'm not going to be manually renaming hundreds (thousands?) of folders. The point of using MC18 to do this is because it should be able to rename the folders based on tags.

[WeeHappyPixie]

What is the exact naming convention you want. It is easy with the Rename, Copy & Move files option.

My base path is M:\Music then I have a directory rule as

[File Type]\[Album Artist]\[Year]\[Album]

My File rule is [Track #] - [Artist] - [Name]

This gives me M:\Music\flac\Jean Michel Jarre\2004\Aero for a file structure.

I have flac, ape and wma files all within my music folder.

Works a treat. You can do your entire library in seconds.

John

[6233638]

Thanks, that's what I have been trying to do, but it doesn't actually rename the folders.

When the directory changes, it creates a new directory with the name you specify and moves the files, rather than renaming the existing directory.

That's fine if the directory is empty after moving the files, as it will just delete it, but I have at least a folder.jpg inside most of them, and a lot of my newer digital purchases have PDF documents in there as well, so I'm left with those files in the original directory, and a second directory with the music.

For example, changing from:
[Album Artist (auto)]\[Album]

to:
[Album Artist (auto)]\[[Year]] - [Album]

leaves me with:

[MrC]

If you want MC to manage ALL the files inside a folder, you need to import them, and create a maintenance view that shows all the folder contents so that your rename will work.  MC doesn't attempt to touch files that have not been imported - hence the requirement for a new folder to be created so that the move can succeed for those files that are imported.

[6233638]

Right - I was really hoping to not import those files, but what you're saying makes sense.

I still haven't figured out how to use expressions properly though - how would I get it to automatically group any images in a "cover art" group, and PDFs in a "liner notes" group automatically?
I'm not even sure what I would be tagging them as to do that, or should I just be customizing the library views?

I haven't been importing anything other than music/videos yet, but I was planning on figuring out images soon - part of the problem for me is that there doesn't seem to be a way to set up auto import to only look inside the folder specified, and not subfolders. In my "My Pictures" directory, I don't want it to be automatically importing my Lightroom library, iCloud Photostream etc.

[MrC]

Many folks are for some reason concerned about importing additional file types into MC.  But it shouldn't be a concern.  The extra files won't affect your normal operations, and will provide you with more flexibility.

See my reply #3 here:

   http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=76421.0

You can have MC's auto-import ignore certain folders.

[6233638]

Many folks are for some reason concerned about importing additional file types into MC.  But it shouldn't be a concern.  The extra files won't affect your normal operations, and will provide you with more flexibility.

See my reply #3 here:

   http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=76421.0

You can have MC's auto-import ignore certain folders.

Thanks - I wish the search was better for the forums, because a lot of the time I feel like I'm probably asking things that have already been answered many times in the past when posting here.

While you can have MC's auto-import exclude certain folders, the problem is that you can only do them one at a time, and I want to ignore the majority of subfolders. It would be much easier for me to tell it to only look for file changes in the selected directory and ignore subfolders, rather than add a folder and then 10 exclusion rules for the subfolders - especially when programs like Lightroom will automatically create a new folder for each year that will need a new exclusion rule. (e.g. \My Pictures\2011\ , \My Pictures\2012\ , \My Pictures\2013\ )

And is there any way to have auto-import apply the same rules to more than one folder at once? When setting things up initially, I ended up having to recreate the same rules to import my film rips (to set the media type for .iso files to Video) multiple times, as they are stored over a number of different disks. (e.g. C:\Video\ D:\Video\ E:\Video\)

I realize that a lot of this is probably caused by my folder structures, but I don't want things to be entirely contained within MC18 - I always want to have a folder structure I can understand, rather than one that needs a specific piece of software running to make sense of it.

[MrC]

I can't think of a way to have auto-import use patterns or rules to avoid the current necessity of restricting certain folders, so in your case, it will be rather tedious I suppose.

[6233638]

I can't think of a way to have auto-import use patterns or rules to avoid the current necessity of restricting certain folders, so in your case, it will be rather tedious I suppose.

Well right now, the options you have are:

Include this folder and all child folders
Exclude this folder and all child folders

All you really need is "Include this folder only"

And for the .iso rules I was having to create multiple times, all you really need is the ability to enter multiple paths. E.g.
"C:\Video\"; "D:\Video\"; "E:\Video\";