basically, i want to take whatever folder i am in and display only the folders that exclusively contain image files AND have no sub directories below them, or the images themselves without showing the files from the root of the search. the results could either be displayed as thumnailed folders, or as a flat (no folder) view, but in the second case, i would need to be able to select the results and move them to the destination path, preserving their parent folder name and not leaving a bunch of empty folders behind.
I don't think there's an easy way to do that. Filtering is done on the items themselves, not on the children of them, so there's no easy way to filter a folder based on what it contains (rather than attributes of the folder itself).
It's probably possible to do it using a scripting language which tells Opus which files/folders to add to a file collection, but that's a lot more work.
Oh, re-reading the question, to do is the second way (seeing the images, not the folders) you could:
[ul][li]Go into flat-view (mixed, no folders)[/li]
[li]Filter and/or Select on *.jpg (or whatever is appropriate)[/li]
[li]Select everything and copy it to the destination (say yes when asked if you want to re-create the folder structure; if you're not asked you've turned off the question in Preferences - File Operations)[/li]
[li]Delete all the empty folders[/li][/ul]
Only problem I can see is the last step, if you want it to leave folders which were already empty. If you want to delete all empty folders below the starting point then it should be easy.
Do those steps make sense? If so we can work out how to automate them, but I thought it best to check I've understood what you want to do first.
i have a separate drive that i store all my files on, separate from the drive that the operating system is on. i then have (or try to) that drive organized by content, sort of like My Documents, but Windows doesn't stick a bunch of crap in there and mess it up. the problem is that in the folder "M:\Master Archive", there are folders that have image files in them, that are supposed to be where they are and DO contain other subfolders and possibly a mixture image and non-image files. the stuff i am trying to move was part of some automated downloads and supposed to be put into a specified folder "M:\Master Archive_jpg" where the it would create a folder based on the site it was downloaded from ("M:\Master Archive_jpg\website.com\image.jpg")...instead, the "_jpg" folder was not written to, so I got tons of folders (website1.com, website2.com, website3.com, ect...) in the "M:\Master Archive" folder. that's why i wanted to filter out folders that contained images only, and did not have any subfolders in them. although i never figured out a way to do things the way i mentioned, i didn't get it done by doing a date filter and just getting the folders created in the past week and that left me with far fewer folders to remove from the group that trying to work with everything.
is there an expression or something i can use to filter out just the empty or 0 byte folders? i tried searching around, but i the only stuff i came across involved multiple steps that seemed more drawn out than it needed to be. i assume this could be done using a filter, i am just not seeing how i need to structure it exactly so that i can save it and make a button to search for "empties" in the current folder so i can finish cleaning this mess up.
yeah, that was one of the threads i read. could a button be made that does that with a single click? i do have some buttons that do stuff similar to what i am after, such as one that switches to thumbnail view, filters out everything but images and sorts by the "date modified", which i use a lot (hopefully less now with the download filters), but i was never ever to figure this one out. something similar with finding "empties" has been one of two major wishes eluding me for some time (the other being to set the "ESC" key to refresh and restore a lister to it's default view). i guess the frustrating part is that at first glance, the tools to do it appear to be there and i just end up feeling i just can't figure it out.
Try this for the flat-view method:
Set HIDEFILTERFILENAME=* FLATVIEW=Mixed SORTBY=size SORTREVERSE=Off
GetSizes