How To: Searching Multiple Files In Lightroom

I am going through ten years of archive photos at The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium and creating Adobe Lightroom catalogs in preparation for a massive file type migration.

Catalog of CD Archive

We have over 800,000 images taking up about 27 terabytes of space. Many of the files are duplicates in various formats. There are about 400,000 legacy small derivative files (500GB) in a format that is no longer supported by our web client. While they are duplicates, we will not throw them away, they will simply be taken offline and put on tape. There are also about 300,000 TIFFs which are production masters. As discussed in an earlier post, these files are rarely if ever accessed and there are corresponding RAW archive masters. These TIFFs will also be moved offline on to tape. This will free up close to 8 terabytes.

The challenge I have created for myself, is to have at least one of every image remain on our server, so I am looking for files that do not exist in RAW format (there are about 3000 files - 1% - that were not archived properly). So, how to find 3000 files out of 300,000?

I tried a Windows search of the image server using a semicolon delimited list. Unfortunately, this produced poor results for reasons I can not explain. So then, in my newly minted Lightroom catalog, I tried a filename search "Contains" semicolon delimited list.

Semicolon delimited search

This was a test. I knew those files were in there. So, I tried a Filename "Contains" comma delimited list.

The winner

List Folder Contents

Making a list of the contents of a folder can be one of the more frustrating activities.

I was doing it by opening the Command Prompt (Start Menu-Run cmd) and entering:

Dir /b [pathname] > [pathname]\list.txt

for example

Dir /b I:\MasterFolder\Subfolder\jpegs > I:\MasterFolder\Subfolder\jpegs\list.txt

This would put a text file called "list" in the jpegs folder. 

Doesn't seem too hard, right? But when the pathname is long, or you have several folders you want to list, this process can be very time consuming. Mostly because you can not copy/paste into the Command Prompt and I would have multiple typos, folder names could not have a space in them, and there is something about the "\" key that confuses me.

Fortunately, there is freeware that makes this task unnecessary. I found DirPrint at http://www.softpedia.com/get/File-managers/Dir-Print.shtml

All you have to do is open the application, select a folder and you instantly have a list of the contents. Phew!