UltraSearch Professional

Kevin Freels

Just for the search in question. And then eliminate additional folders as I go. I'm sure there are ways to do it but I was thinking "easy". Here's another example that may be more useful.

First, I have to say that my file structure is a wreck. Two years ago I had a lot of data in both Google Drive and OneDrive and had begun consolidating. Lightning got through my USP and fried my SSD and one drive in a 3 drive RAID. A lot was copying from Google to OneDrive at the time. I had to put it all back together in a rush and 3 days later I was dealing with a divorce. It's been chaos ever since. lol Getting it all straight is still a work in progress.

Anyways, my Documents folder has 61 folders in it. Half are there because 30 nitwits thought their software was so important that it needed a dedicated folder in my Documents. :-? Within that is a folder of personal pics. That's split into multiple subfolders.

Going back up, there are several other folders and subfolders with photos for various reasons. Going up to the root of onedrive, there are photos in Downloads, and again, folders and subfolders of different types of images. The problem is that when I began digital photography, tagging wasn't a thing. By the time I had software capable of tagging, I didn't bother because the folder structure was too large to ever expect to tag everything.

The Pictures folder is where all of my "real photos" are. I switched from film to a Canon 5D in 2006. I always saved them to an external RAID drive and later, also to the cloud. I have 17 years of photo jobs, weddings, experiments, and just plain fun. All sorted by months because that's all the early systems could do. That's 204 folders. Then each month broken down by job. If I shot three weddings, 14 senior sets, 4 marching band shows, 6 personal events, and 2 experiments, that's 26 subfolders...in folder 1.

Following the crash two years ago I decided to keep everything on OneDrive and locally just have it available if needed. The files were smaller back in the day but i shot a lot more with the camera since phones were lousy. As time went on, I moved into telecom instead of photography as a career, phone cameras improved, and the usage shifted. Altogther there are 1962 folders with the Canon Monthly folder structure....roughly 275,000 photos.

Phone backups also go to this folder as well but that folder is "Samsung". It's folders have a different structure and contain just over 128,000 images over the last 15 years. Well over 400,000 files just between the phone and my DSLR. The phone stuff is a mess because different phones have had different structures to their folders and filenames over the years. Also, I've had phones crash, and on restore they've done weird things to file attributes and other similar issues.

And of course there are photos SENT to me. over the years, photo scans from the film days, and well, you get the picture. It's totally insane. It has to be well over a half-million and probably around 5000 folders. I've been slowly reorganizing it, trying to eliminate duplicates, screenshots, and other crap, but it's incredibly slow.
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Meanwhile, I currently run a small wireless ISP. I started 7 years ago and I've used screencaps of bandwidth tests, pics of checks for deposits, training, marketing, all the content on the website, troubleshooting, mapping, inventory records...all in OneDrive for Business. ... Another 500k images...

And there are plenty of photos in the wrong OneDrive accounts. lol

And that's what led to this idea.
I'm looking for a screencap of an SMS conversation with my sister that happend in 2016-2017...about an 18 month window. I do know it was a screencap from my phone but I don't know if it is in one of the many phone pics folders, or if I moved it to a folder in my documents, or if I renamed it, or if I put it in a family folder... No clue. I don't even know if it's a png or jpg. It's not a RAW so that's good.
I can't possibly think of all the folders that it might be in and not miss any. Going 2-3 levels deep and manually selecting certain subdirectories in each possible root folder would take a very long time.

BUT, that's where the benefit would shine.
I could just run the search. It's super fast! And then I can just eliminate folders and paths as I see all that's in them. The detalis I'm not so clear on. Would need to sit down and think it through. But that's really what I'm after.

There was a detail that I was going to mention but I guess it ran off. I'm sure it will be back. When it does, I'll shoot it over to you.

Thanks for taking the time to investigate this possibility even if it doesn't pan out. Have a great day!