An annoying thing that happened the other day …
So I shifted the Adobe Photoshop Expressions (APE, or sometimes PSE) photos from my C: drive to an external drive. As recommended, I used the Move command, which (in theory) would shift the files over while still keeping them related to the photo data in the APE Organizer.
And, apparently, it just that. Easy-peasy. Took quite a bit of time, but it worked.
Though I noticed, after it was done, that it had flattened the file structure. Unlike the original My Photos directory with both files in the root and in various as-downloaded-from-camera sub-directories, now everything was under the root of the My Photos folder on the E: drive.
And then, when I was working on photos a couple of nights ago, I started finding all these unattached thumbnails — photos in the Organizer that were flagged as not being attached to a file. I tried the reattachment process, and had some success — evidently the mass move worked, but some of the files needed to be manually reattached to the database.
But some photo files just didn’t seem to be there. Or, rather they were … but they were different photos.
Aha.
See, cameras are pretty good, each to their own, in keeping up a unique sequence of files: IMG00001.jpg, IMG00002.jpg, etc.
But that’s a pretty limited serialization, i.e., just within the camera. Different cameras might have slightly different prefixes and codes — IMG_0001.jpg, or P080712001.jpg, for example — but there’s no guarantee, esp. if you end up with two cameras from the same manufacturer, that the two cameras will not both generate a file of the same name.
You see where this is going.
In the C: drive setup, each camera’s files were in their own subdirectory. APE only paid attention to the full file path + filename, so it treated both of the IMG00001.jpg files as unique. But when APE copied them over to a flattened directory structure, there were duplicates.
Which APE didn’t warn about, didn’t make the filenames unique … it just overwrote the previous IMG00001.jpg copied over with the latest one.
Ugh.
And, of course, I had already cleaned off the files from the C: drive. And my backup process, which would have saved this, turned out not to be working. (There’s another story there.) So … they were gone.
Now, this was not an utter disaster. I cull photos pretty ruthlessly, so it was maybe 1 in 7 chances that there would be two files of the same name. Of those, most or all were off of my Blackberries (remember when I had to exchange Blackberries last spring? Yup, duplicate filenames, as of my trip to the Netherlands), and most of the key ones there had been moblogged, so they existed in my “Three-Star Dave” Flickr account. That still left probably 30-40 pictures lost — and the four or five I couldn’t live without, I screen-capped from the broken thumbnail in APE and so kept slightly fuzzier and smaller pictures, but still usable.
Irksome, and so many lessons:
- Adobe’s process here sucks. Not only should it have retained the directory structure, but if it didn’t, it should have warned of duplicates. (The mechanism for reattaching a thumbnail to a photo is also sucky, but that’s another matter.)
- I should have backed up the stuff before I moved it. And I should have validated the backup.
- It’s a good thing to get photos online, as it means you now have two copies that are unlikely to both vanish at the same time.
We live and learn.