Slightly off topic - Need help with batch files PLEASE

Golden Paws Photography

Hi there,

I'm sorry this is slightly off-topic, but I really need some help!!

I need a program that will easily create new directories (a lot of them) and then move files into those new directories. When I am taking pictures of dog shows, I record the last number for each dog. I would like a way to a) add a directory that would be that dog's name and b) move all files from that last image number back to the previously used one into that new directory. I was told that batch files can do this, but I'll be darned if I can figure it out! Anyone have any ideas?? I would REALLY appreciate some help, fast!!

Nicole Wiebusch
Golden Paws Photography
www.goldenpawsphotography.com

jfriend

Golden Paws Photography wrote:

Hi there,

I'm sorry this is slightly off-topic, but I really need some help!!

I need a program that will easily create new directories (a lot of them) and then move files into those new directories. When I am taking pictures of dog shows, I record the last number for each dog. I would like a way to a) add a directory that would be that dog's name and b) move all files from that last image number back to the previously used one into that new directory. I was told that batch files can do this, but I'll be darned if I can figure it out! Anyone have any ideas?? I would REALLY appreciate some help, fast!!

Nicole Wiebusch
Golden Paws Photography
www.goldenpawsphotography.com

This sounds like your are trying to do image classification and your images happen be in sequence number where all images of a particular dog are in sequence order so you just need to find the first one and the last one and then you can classify/move them en-masse. There are a number of ways to do this.

I do something similar when I'm trying to take all the photos from a soccer season and classify organize them by the soccer player so that I can post a gallery for each player. Here's what I do.

First, my software is Adobe Photoshop CS3. I use Adobe Bridge (part of CS3) for my image classification. You didn't say what software you have so it's hard to give any mroe specific guidance there, but there are many programs that can do this.

In Bridge, I open the directory that has the images in it I'm tring to classify. I then create keywords for each player's name. I then go through the directory sequentially and assign the right keyword (player's name) to each image. At this point, the keyword is just stored as metadata associated with the image - I'll be able to use the keywords in later steps.

In your particular case, you could scan the thumbnails in Bridge, find the first photo for a particular dog and make it the selected image, then advance sequentially until you see the last photo for that dog. Shift-select on that last photo and this will now make a multi-selection that includes all the images for that dog. Then, assign the keyword to all the select images (just requires one click in Bridge). Then, move on to the next dog and repeat until you've gone through all the images.

At this point, I now have a directory of images that are keyworded by player's name. You would have a directory keyworded by dog.

Depending upon what you want to do with the images later, you can either use a filter to see just the images for one particular dog, you can search for all the images of one particular dog or you can easily select all the images for one particular dog and then drag/drop them to their own directory. I use to drag/drop the images for each soccer player into their own directory, but now with filters in Adobe Bridge CS3, I no longer find that necessary because with one click, I can easily see just the photos associated with any particular player. In my case, when I then want to upload the photos for one particular player to their gallery, I filter on that player's name (one click), select all the photos that are displayed (one keystroke) and then drag/drop the resulting photos to an image uploader for that gallery. I can then repeat the process for each player.

BradfordBenn

I first must admit that I read the response kind of quickly. But I am thinking that Adobe PhotoShop Lightroom might do what you want as well. There are features in there that lets you decide what images to import based on time ranges, I am not sure if it will give you the granularity you want.

The video help is at http://www.adobe.com/go/learn_lr_video_import and last time I checked they have a 30 day free trial.