Moving Folders (and Files)

jclay

I am interested in any advice or reference links you may provide so I might better understand the consequences of moving files. I have spent many hours using Tonfotos’ facial recognition feature to assign faces to most of the photos on my Windows Laptop’s Picture folder. I now am in the middle of organizing many years of personal photos so I am rearranging and organizing my photos into many different folders. I am retrieving all the photos from my cell phone as well as my wife’s cell phone and plan to insert those photos into my present Picture Folder. I will be creating folders for my photos for years such as 2024, 2023, etc. Then in 2024, I might create folders such as Vacation to Beach_April or Vacation to Mountains_September, etc. I am running out of storage space on my local laptop’s hard drive so I plan to move massive amounts of folders and files from my Picture Folder on my Windows PC to a dual External RAID Storage Device. Many of the photos have already been scanned by Tonfotos and all name suggestions have already been confirmed or corrected in the Tonfotos App. Of course, I will be adding additional photos to these folders. The folder structure will initially be the same when I move the photos to the external device. I am assuming that since the tonfotos.ini files will get moved with the folders…I’ll be able to maintain all that information even after I move the folders. As I start to further organize and possibly create new folders and move pics into the new folders, will I lose my Tonfotos face assignments and will I need to do that work again (face assignments)? I know there is the feature within Tonfotos (Ctrl M) that allows you to move photos and maintain the Tonfotos saved info but I was thinking that was more geared for moving individual photos and not hundreds/thousands of photos that I plan to do as I reorganize all my personal photos. Any advice you might have would be appreciated and any links to other information that might help me better understand what the consequences will be as I move or create folders and move individual files. Thanks!

Andrey

jclay When you move files together with ini file in the same folder, all face associations will be preserved. So, moving or renaming complete folders is not an issue. The downside is if you move outside of Tonfotos, you will need to wait for program to scan those files again, but when it is done, face associations will be there already.

When moving with Control+M you don’t need to wait. Also, with Control+M you are not constrained with moving whole content folders to make sure no data is lost, you can move individual files and it will handle updating ini files for you.

Also, you should know that there is a function for improt from Smartphone that will structure all files to folders like YEAR/DATE for you. Also, there is very similar funciton but for folders: https://community.tonfotos.com/d/175-version-143-simplification-of-copying-files-to-archive I guess you can simplify your task a lot just by using those. Later you may add more meaningful names to those date folders, but with Tonfotos you probably don’t even need that, since you can navigate easily anyway, using maps, people, date and so on.

jclay

Thanks Andrey for your reply and that information. I have a question about the importing of images from your phone into Tonfotos. I have an iPhone and I use iCloud for backing up my photos to the cloud. There is a “space saving” feature on iPhones so all the phone’s storage doesn’t get quickly filled up with photos and Videos. The option in Settings is called “Optimize iPhone Storage”. Here is Apple’s explanation of this feature if you elect to turn it on: If you iPhone is low on space, full-resolution photos and videos are automatically replaced with smaller, device-sized versions. Full-resolution versions can be downloaded from iCloud anytime.

My question is if you have this feature turned on to save space, full resolution copies of your photos are not stored on your iPhone. When you import photos from your iPhone into Tonfotos, is Tonfotos grabbing the "smaller, device-sized versions or is Tonfotos actually requesting the full sized version from iCloud?

If Tonfotos is grabbing the small version of the photo, a “work around”….assuming you have adequate storage space on your iPhone … may be to turn that feature off which will trigger iCloud to download full sized images to your phone" and then do your import. After that is done, you could turn the feature back on which will trigger the conversion back to the smaller file size photos. The biggest drawback to this if you want to download future images, you are back to getting the “smaller file size versions” of your photos if this feature is on.

Andrey

jclay When using Tonfotos’ import from Smartphone, program will only take what is available, in this case “smaller sized versions”. Obvisously it cannot take anything from your iCloud since it has no access there.

If you are planing to migrate from iCloud, there is more options to do that, not just thru the phone. You can install iCloud app on your Windows and then sync all data locally. Also, you can export all your data from iCloud using https://privacy.apple.com/account - there is an option to download all your data.

However, based on what you describe, it does not look that you are planning permanent migration. You want to continue using both iCloud and local storage to keep all your photos, and keep onlly smaller versions on your phone. Is that correct? In that case, I think instead of trying to import from your phone, it would make much more sense to install iCloud client and sync your data with iCloud directly, where originals are stored.