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Limits of software

PatrickSweeney
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p.1 #1 · Limits of software

OK, I started all this back when the Digital Rebel was the hottest thing to have. I Loaded Zoombrowser EX to sort and manage the photos.

Alas, it cannot recognize the video files from my new R7.

Much as I hate to, I'm going to have to shift over to some other software (I refuse to call them "apps") to download, stuff into folders and manage my images.

This keeping up gets harder all the time.

Jul 22, 2026 at 10:15 AM

gdanmitchell
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p.1 #2 · Limits of software

One thing I�ve learned (the hard way, more than once) is that the longer you wait to move to newer standards the harder it becomes� and eventually it can become almost impossible.

The most straightfoward solution and one used most widely today is Lightroom from Adobe.

You might consider cross-posting this in the Post-Precessing And Printing forum, where software stuff is often discussed and where the participants may include people who won�t see it in a Canon-centric forum.

Good luck!

Jul 22, 2026 at 10:51 AM

RoamingScott
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p.1 #3 · Limits of software

Copy and paste from a card reader has and still does work just fine for the exact thing you're doing. Why you'd need an additional layer of software to accomplish that is beyond me.

Jul 22, 2026 at 10:54 AM

Tom_W
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p.1 #4 · Limits of software

RoamingScott wrote:
Copy and paste from a card reader has and still does work just fine for the exact thing you're doing. Why you'd need an additional layer of software to accomplish that is beyond me.

I always copy and paste files from the camera's card before I open Lightroom. I want them on the drive first, and placed in a folder created based on the date the images were taken. Then once they're on the hard drive (SSD these days), I disconnect the camera and then open Lightroom to let it do its own catalog database magic.

Actually, if it's a lot of images from, perhaps, a birding outing or an event like an air show, I will go through them quickly with DPP to weed out the obvious duds and duplicates, then go to Lightroom.

I really need a new system (a new way of storing stuff), given that adding storage is near impossible on a Mac, and that's where LR looks for the files. That's the downside of having a program with its own catalog system.

Jul 22, 2026 at 11:32 AM

RoamingScott
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p.1 #5 · Limits of software

Tom_W wrote:
I always copy and paste files from the camera's card before I open Lightroom. I want them on the drive first, and placed in a folder created based on the date the images were taken. Then once they're on the hard drive (SSD these days), I disconnect the camera and then open Lightroom to let it do its own catalog database magic.

Actually, if it's a lot of images from, perhaps, a birding outing or an event like an air show, I will go through them quickly with DPP to weed out the obvious duds and duplicates, then go to...Show more →

You should be using fast external storage for this anyways. Once SSD prices come down, I'd highly recommend moving your scratch and archives to externals. Unfortunately you missed the boat, price wise, by a year.

Jul 22, 2026 at 11:34 AM

PatrickSweeney
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p.1 #6 · Limits of software

I don't process images. I fuss over exposure and such on-site and get it right. Once back, I toss the obvious duds and save.

The software I use is simply to store them. Copy and past doesn't let me create sub-folders by date in a given event folder, which Zoombrowser does, and I've gotten used to.

Jul 22, 2026 at 01:12 PM

Sy Sez
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p.1 #7 · Limits of software

It's easy enough to setup your own categorical image/video folder structure, and there are a number of free programs that permit browsing & viewing video files including DPP, Adobe Bridge, FastStone Image Viewer. etc.

Create a folder, & name it, click on that folder and create a sub-folder or multiple folders within it & name them.

Jul 22, 2026 at 01:13 PM

rscheffler
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p.1 #8 · Limits of software

Tom_W wrote:
I really need a new system (a new way of storing stuff), given that adding storage is near impossible on a Mac, and that's where LR looks for the files. That's the downside of having a program with its own catalog system.

You can put the Lightroom catalog wherever you want it to be. It doesn't have to be in the default location on your Mac, which I now can't even remember where that was.

I don't use LR to manage all of my photos, just to process them. For this reason, I create a LR catalog within a project folder on an external NVMe SSD 'working drive' that includes all the keepers, outtakes, processed files, etc. This way, as I archive a project to various backup drives, the catalog travels with the files rather than being part of a massive central catalog (though it is possible to create and split off individual project-specific catalogs from a larger master catalog). By starting on an external SSD, it keeps the likelihood of a ballooning LR catalog from consuming all of the available storage on my system.

As you may or may not know, with all the new AI features such as masks and Denoise, the current version of LR's catalog can quickly inflate to massive proportions. I have recently been purging outtakes from old jobs to recover valuable HDD storage by first running them through Denoise and exporting as jpegs before deleting the RAW outtakes. Some of these projects have ~5000+ outtakes. I made a LR catalog dedicated specifically to this task, and when 5-10k files have had Denoise applied, the catalog can balloon into the 50+ GB range. Now imagine years worth of images in a single catalog, many with AI edits applied, and you can extrapolate how a boot drive can quickly run out of available storage when loaded with all the photos from a few large projects, plus the supporting LR catalog.

For knowing where all my files are located across way too many hard drives, I use a digital asset management app called NeoFinder. It's inexpensive and very well supported by its developer, receiving very frequent updates and improvements. For culling shoots, adding metadata, custom renaming based on metadata, etc., I use Photo Mechanic, in part because when I did a lot more on-deadline editorial work, it was the industry standard. It's very powerful for what it does, but also very niche and has recently become a fairly expensive app. These three apps - LR, NeoFinder and Photo Mechanic all overlap to some degree, yet each has certain strengths that make it worthwhile for me to use. There are probably a bunch of other photo/video management apps out there with similar capabilities...

Edited on Jul 22, 2026 at 02:06 PM · View previous versions

Jul 22, 2026 at 02:01 PM

RoamingScott
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p.1 #9 · Limits of software

Sy Sez wrote:
It's easy enough to setup your own categorical image/video folder structure, and there are a number of free programs that permit browsing & viewing video files including DPP, Adobe Bridge, FastStone Image Viewer. etc.

Create a folder, & name it, click on that folder and create a sub-folder or multiple folders within it & name them.

This.

I can't imagine a more obtuse and functionally useless file hierarchy than one based on parent folders that are simply single day dates, though.

Mine is [year] > [event or batch name (raw files go here)] > [edited (jpegs go here)]

There are a few cameras that get their own parent folder so I can find their folders more easily, like my Hasselblad, but under my Hasselblad folder I follow the same above logic.

It makes finding files in my file explorer so easy.

Jul 22, 2026 at 02:05 PM

rscheffler
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p.1 #10 · Limits of software

RoamingScott wrote:
I can't imagine a more obtuse and functionally useless file hierarchy than one based on parent folders that are simply single day dates, though.

Maybe you don't find that logical, yet perhaps the OP does? If it works for them, why change it? I mean, I wouldn't put photos in a folder simply named "22" inside a folder named "07" inside a folder named "2026" but that seems to be the default of some apps, such as some from Canon that I've used for scanning, etc.

By the sounds of it, maybe what the OP wants is an app that will create a dated subfolder based on the time/date metadata within the photos at the time of importing to the computer? I know Photo Mechanic can do this, either on import or when you use it to copy/move photos to another location. But as mentioned in my previous post, it's now an expensive and specialized app. I haven't looked for this capability elsewhere but I'm guessing it also exists in other apps.

FWIW, my image importing routine with Photo Mechanic is for it to put images in a dated folder where I point it to, using the app's {datesort} variable that creates a YYYYMMDD folder name, plus whatever other descriptive text I wish to include. That folder will reside as such on my working SSDs and eventually is moved to HDD cold storage where it might end up on drives dedicated to various categories such as 'jobs' 'sports' 'travel' etc. And on each of those drives would then be relevant subfolders, such as football, hockey, soccer, country names, client names, etc.

For me at least, the YYYYMMDD string is integral to my organizational thought processes. It's how I remember stuff like this. But I additionally use NeoFinder so that I can quickly also find what I need with descriptive text searches. For this reason I'm a proponent of adding caption/keyword information to individual image files.

Jul 22, 2026 at 02:32 PM

PatrickSweeney
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p.1 #11 · Limits of software

My system is simple and easy for me.

An example would be:

2026 HS Soccer Finals
05-17-2026
05-18-2026
05-19-2026
Where the 2026 HS part is the main folder, and the dates are sub-folders.

If I want to find someone who was in one of the previous years I go to the "2025 HS Soccer Finals" for example.

Jul 22, 2026 at 02:40 PM

gdanmitchell
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p.1 #12 · Limits of software

PatrickSweeney wrote:
I don't process images. I fuss over exposure and such on-site and get it right. Once back, I toss the obvious duds and save.

The software I use is simply to store them. Copy and past doesn't let me create sub-folders by date in a given event folder, which Zoombrowser does, and I've gotten used to.

If you are on a Mac (and probably Windows, but that�s not my world) and you just want to copy them into subfolders by date, you don�t need any software at all.

You can sort the contents of the folder holding the photos on your car by date � that choice is simply a popup menu choice in the finer. The just use the old shift-click method to select all of the photos from one date and move them to a folder you created for that date. Repeat for additional dates.

It sounds more complicated than it is.

In order to understand your workflow a bit better:

- am I right that you are just capturing jpg files in camera?

- and that you don�t want to do _any_ post-processing on the files once htey are on the computer?

- and that the ONLY thing you want to do is move them to the computer and have them end up in folders organized by date?

Jul 22, 2026 at 02:45 PM

rscheffler
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p.1 #13 · Limits of software

PatrickSweeney wrote:
My system is simple and easy for me.

An example would be:

2026 HS Soccer Finals
05-17-2026
05-18-2026
05-19-2026
Where the 2026 HS part is the main folder, and the dates are sub-folders.

If I want to find someone who was in one of the previous years I go to the "2025 HS Soccer Finals" for example.

That would be simple to do in Photo Mechanic. If directly from the memory card, in the Ingest (import) dialog box, you'd direct Photo Mechanic to import to your drive with the following path: 2026 HS Soccer Finals/{month0}-{day0}-{year4}

The "{month0}-{day0}-{year4}" string in this example (and there could be many variations on this) consists of 'variables' that Photo Mechanic uses to translate the time stamp in each photo to an accordingly named folder and then moves the corresponding photos to that folder. If the card had photos spanning multiple days, months, years, a folder would be automatically created during import for each date and the corresponding photos placed in each folder. The same can be done when moving photos. Say you have a folder containing a lot of photos spanning a significant time period. You could copy/move the photos to another destination and based on the variables you use, can have the photos placed in dated folders. Same can be done with photo renaming by using EXIF metadata as a basis for the new file names. For example I just rename all photos to a date and time string to synchronize multiple cameras during a given project. In my case it's YYYYMMDD-HHMMSSss. I don't use descriptive text in file names, at least not at the 'work in progress' stage. And yes, I sync my cameras before each shoot. Or I take a photo with each camera of a clock that includes seconds and then shift the time on photos from the secondary cameras to align with the primary camera.

Jul 22, 2026 at 02:54 PM

PatrickSweeney
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p.1 #14 · Limits of software

In order to understand your workflow a bit better:

- am I right that you are just capturing jpg files in camera?

- and that you don�t want to do _any_ post-processing on the files once htey are on the computer?

- and that the ONLY thing you want to do is move them to the computer and have them end up in folders organized by date?

Yes on all. Life is too short to be "processing" raw files. I want organization I can continue into the future.

Jul 22, 2026 at 03:20 PM

Mike Deep
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p.1 #15 · Limits of software

Some random unstructured thoughts:
-I copy files with a USB3 card reader using Windows Explorer. I never connect the camera to USB.
-I use EOS Utility's Monitor Folder function to sort the files into subfolders by date and camera, and to assign ISO 8601 compliant filenames containing camera model and image number, both to avoid collisions and make files sortable just by name by any software on Earth.
-I use Lightroom for processing, but I don't let it build a catalog. The day will come when I'll have to migrate away from Adobe (Probably when Windows 10 ESR ends), no sense in becoming dependent on it.

Jul 22, 2026 at 04:08 PM

TomSchriefer
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p.1 #16 · Limits of software

This works just fine for me. Remove card from camera. Insert card into computer. Double-click the desktop program: "Import Canon Photos"

The program finds the card, verifies there are files to copy. Creates a new folder to copy those files to. The folder name is built in the program. The program reads the date from the computer's OS. It uses that information to generate a 'folder' named: 20260722, or whatever the date is. This folder is a newly generated sub-folder of :usersmepicturesnewimports. Formatting the date like this makes everything to do with manipulating that date butt-easy. The program keeps all of my new imports in one place until I can cull and process them. At that point, I manually generate whatever foldername I need in the location of my choosing.

Everything from card to computer with one-double click of the mouse. The program is pasted below in its entirety. It is not copyrighted. Feel free to use it or modify as you see fit Here it is:
rem -------------------------------------------------------------
rem author: Thomas A. Schriefer
rem PROGRAM NAME: Import_Canon_Photos.bat
rem -------------------------------------------------------------
@Echo off
color 1F
cls
echo.

echo --------------------------------------------------------------
echo This program needs a canon-formatted card in drive d: e: or f:
echo --------------------------------------------------------------
echo.

echo This program searches for Canon's default directory:
echo (drive):dcim100canon
echo on drives d: e: f: g:

set drive=d:
if exist %drive%dcim100canon (
goto foundit
)

set drive=e:
if exist %drive%dcim100canon (
goto foundit
)

set drive=f:
if exist %drive%dcim100canon (
goto foundit
)

set drive=g:
if exist %drive%dcim100canon (
goto foundit
)

rem If execution gets here, there is no valid card in drive
echo.
echo no valid card found, aborting when you
echo.
pause
exit

:foundit
rem --------------------------------------------------------------
rem obtain today's date/time from system
rem --------------------------------------------------------------
rem extract date from system
set YY=%date:~-4%
set DD=%date:~-7,2%
set MM=%date:~-10,2%
set today=%YY%%MM%%DD%

goto skiptime

rem extract time from system
set minute=%time:~-8,2%
set hour=%time:~-11,2%
rem removes space(s) from hour
set hour=%hour: =%
set now=%hour%%minute%
set folder=%today%%now%

:skiptime
set folder=%today%
echo.
echo All imported files will be copied from your card
echo to subfolder: %folder%. (YYMMDD)
rem YYMMDD(h)HMM if using time

rem --------------------------------------------------------------
rem import any files found in x:dcim100canon
rem --------------------------------------------------------------
%drive% rem set active drive
cd dcim100canon
echo.
echo Copying any/all files to c:usersschripicturesNewImports%folder%
echo.

rem makes new directory, if needed
rem - otherwise all files to same daily directory
rem - any duplicates will prompt overwrite
if not exist c:usersschripicturesNewImports%folder% (
md c:usersschripicturesNewImports%folder%
)
xcopy /-Y *.* c:usersschripicturesNewImports%folder%

echo.
echo Process completed. Terminating program when you...
pause
:abort
exit /b
rem ---------------------- /END PROGRAM ------------------------

Jul 22, 2026 at 04:44 PM

gdanmitchell
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p.1 #17 · Limits of software

PatrickSweeney wrote:
In order to understand your workflow a bit better:

- am I right that you are just capturing jpg files in camera?

- and that you don�t want to do _any_ post-processing on the files once htey are on the computer?

- and that the ONLY thing you want to do is move them to the computer and have them end up in folders organized by date?

Yes on all. Life is too short to be "processing" raw files. I want organization I can continue into the future.

Well, aside from the fact that I�d say �life is too short to NOT post-process my photographs,� that helps.

There are great post-processing and file management apps that do exactly what you are asking about. For example, I�m use an Adobe Bridge/ACR/Photoshop workflow, and the first step for me is to let Bridge automatically import files from the camera in essentially the folder organization scheme that you use. It can also easily rename the individual files ��in my case I append the shot date in the modified file name. But if you don�t want to post-process� that is probably overkill for you.

I was serious when I suggested that you don�t really need _any_ third-party apps to do what you are asking for. You could actually do it pretty quickly directly in the finder if you choose the popup option to sort files by date and then simply drag them manually to dated-named folders.

Jul 22, 2026 at 04:47 PM


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