Is there a way to change file collection pointers?

Help & Support
1

I have a couple of large file collections of "marked" images that used to be stored on drive Q:.

They are now on drive P:.

Is there a way to perform a mass change (i.e., search & replace) of the source pointers in the collection? The only thing that needs to be edited is the drive letter, but there are a couple of thousand files in each collection, marked in Viewer from among tens of thousands, so there's no hope of re-marking them.

Thanks

Allen

2

If you type /dopusdata/Collections into the location field, you'll be in the folder where the collections are stored on disk.

As long as Preferences / Miscellaneous / Advanced [Behavior]: compress_collections is the default False value, they are all in XML format, so you can edit them using a text editor and do a search & replace on the paths. That's probably the easiest thing to do.

You should fully exit Opus before editing them (use File > Exit Directory Opus; don't just close the window as it continues running in the background if you do), as collections may be stored in memory while Opus runs and overwritten when it exits.

I'd also make a backup of them first, in case anything goes wrong. If Opus notices files are no longer there then it may remove them from the collections.

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3

Thanks. That's what I thought I could do, but when it didn't work, I wondered if something was repairing my changes behind the scenes. I'd forgotten about the DOpus loader that remains alive when all the listers are closed.

I'll give it a better informed try and see what happens. This will save a tremendous amount of time.

4

Interesting. It worked, but I didn't have to re-edit the changed .col file. I just had to dump DOpus buffers (by fully exiting, as you said). When I reopened DOpus, without editing anything, it picked up the already changed .col file and everything is where I want it.

This might have led to some interesting confusion later on if I hadn't followed up, since the changes would have silently taken effect the next time I rebooted.

Thanks again,

Allen

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