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Moving Files With Vista is Awesome

Moving and Replacing Files in Windows Vista

Ok, playing around more with Windows Vista today and I have to say that I absolutely *love* the moving files functionality of Vista.

One of the problems that I have with my photographs is that frequently photo titles get reused. As many of my titles come from song lyrics or just thoughts that pop into my head when I view the photograph, I find myself frequently reusing titles. This is especially true if a title is one word. Discover, Good Times, Alive… you get the idea.

One of the things that I hated about XP and Mac OSX as well for that matter is that frequently I’d try to move my photos from my MacBook to my drobo after I uploaded them and I’d get a message reminding me that I already had a file with that name in the folder and would I like to replace the file or not replace it. The problem though was always that I didn’t know if it was an actual physical dupe file or a different photograph using the same name.

Well now with Vista when it notifies me of this conflict, it actually shows me thumbnails of the photos in question and then gives me three choices. To replace the photo, not to move it, or to move it and give it a new title.

This one little thing makes it so much easier for me in helping to organize my photos. That, combined with easy photo keywording and keyword search from the Vista OS thus far make Vista look like a far better operating system than XP to me.

More details as I experiment more with the OS.

9 Replies to “Moving Files With Vista is Awesome”

  1. That’s one thing about OSX that bugs me too. If you download files using a browser that have the same name, OS X will add “-1, -2, etc” to the file name, but if you use the file browser, it will try to replace it! Why???

  3. Thomas,

    Not sure if you have seen Microsoft’s SyncToy (Beta 2.0). It is used for syncing files from location to location. I have read that it will do this type of copying automatically and detect that the images are not the same shot, even though they might have the same name… and dates etc. I use it for backing up my pics and music to an external drive that is scheduled at night, but cannot confirm that the image replacement explained above works as written though as I have not properly tested that side of it. Works very well for backing up though.

  4. Hey Thomas,

    I’m curious about how you use your Drobos. They aren’t NAS drives as I understand it — just direct USB 2.0 direct attach drives. Do you just attach them directly to your machine, or do you plug them into a router that has USB support to make them shared across multiple machines? I’m currently looking to have some kind of shared ethernet drive for my photos so that other computers in the household can access them at the same time.

  5. Interesting. I personally put all my images in iPhoto on my PowerBook rather than organizing them all manually myself. It doesn’t seem to mind if there are multiple files with the same name; I think it organizes them by date in sub folders or something like that. I pull my best out into a portfolio of sorts and a background photo folder, but that’s about it.

    However I have nothing near the volume of photos that you do, so it’s probably a whole different ball game.

  6. Thomas – great enthusiastic post about Vista and this feature for the copy/move process.

    I could not agree more about how good it is as I have used it to manage my music library and it ensures I do not lose anything from the various directories I have music in.

  7. Thats it?!? A nice ‘move files’ requester is the reason you are giving here to stop bashing on Vista?!? Hey you ever thought about using sub-directories to store your photos based on event or point-in-time? Are you aware that this requester comes from an *application*, not the operating system itself – its the windows file manager, ‘explorer’. The factors that govern whether or not an operating system is ‘awesome’ are both complicated and diverse. This isnt one of them.

  8. I have an old image viewer (ACDSee version 3.1 – maybe 10 years old) that has this functionality (displays both images with overwrite/rename choices if a conflict is detected during a move/copy). Don’t know whether current versions of the application still have it – it was/is a very nice feature.

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