Folder Re-Org

JoshS

Currently, I have 50k+ photos in my Photos folder, spread throughout both the main folder and hundreds of random subfolders. This is where Tonfotos currently pulls from, and each folder has (at least one) .ini file.

However, I would like to start organizing this folder into something more searchable, and I plan on doing Decade –> Year –> Event.

As an example, here’s what I currently have:
*My Photos Folder
–Folder A
—-Photo 1
—-Photo 2
–Folder B
—-Photo 3
—-Photo 4
–Folder C
—-Photo 5
—-Photo 6

And here’s what I want to do:
*My Photos Folder
–1990s
—-1992
——Photo 2
——Family Disney Trip
——–Photo 5
—-1997
——Sally Wedding
——–Photo 1
——Tim Graduation
——–Photo 4
–2010s
—-2014
——Photo 3
——Photo 6

And so on.

This will mean that I’ll be moving photos all around, and they will no longer be tied to the .ini file they’re currently paired with. And since there are many photos per current folder that obviously need to go to many places, I can’t just move the .ini file to a new folder.

What is the best way to do this re-org without having Tonfotos having to start from scratch with rescanning every file?

My initial thought was to move all the .ini files to the main folder, which keeps the metadata from the application within the folder, and that way the new Folders being scanned would have something to reference, but I’m not sure that’s the right approach.

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Andrey

JoshS When you move file using Tonfotos such as by Control+M function, proper ini records will move with it.

However, I think there is even better approach. Using F6 funciton you can move files to YEAR/DATE folders automatically, and that will also take care of ini files. Later you can rename DATE folders to events, merge them if necessary. Optionally, you can move YEARS into DECADES thought I would not recommend that. I can hardly you will have centuries of photos since photography was not around for that long, so just plain years list is totally manageable.

More about F6 here: https://tonfotos.com/docs/library/move-to-main/

JoshS

F6 doesn’t work for this – most of my photos are digitized prints from before digital cameras were invented (thus they don’t have metadata about the dates the photo was taken), so they would move to a folder with the wrong Year/Date, requiring the manual work anyway.

I hear your point about Decade, but since I’m going to be sharing the folder with many family members (and across multiple sides of my family), the Decade folders were for them to find photos easier.