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Deleting empty folders with Thumb files

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 2:31 am
by mschubb
Such a great program! Just merged dozens of image backup folder trees and was able to delete over 12,000 duplicates pretty efficiently.

But I am left with hundreds of empty folders that did not delete because there were thumb.db or .picasa.ini files leftover.

Any suggestions? Did I miss an option somewhere?

If not -- would it be possible in a future release to be able tag file types like this so they will be ignored when the program is deleting just-emptied folders? This would really help cleaning image folders.

Thanks!

Re: Deleting empty folders with Thumb files

Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2011 4:28 pm
by DV
No, it doesn't currently remove these files as they aren't in the duplicate list. Good idea though, will try and find a way of dealing with them.

Re: Deleting empty folders with Thumb files

Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2011 5:50 pm
by therube
> will try and find a way of dealing with them

But why?
If a directory is not empty why should DC take action on it?
What criteria would be used?

If all that remained in the directory were "thumbs.db" or "*.db" or ".ini", then remove?

What is to differentiate a (Windows generated) thumbs.db or a file you may happened to have named, "thumbs.db". Ditto for some .ini file.

Searching for DUPs is fine. Searching or doing something just because it happens to be left over, doesn't seem right to me.

If you know & understand your directory structure, & if you have deleted DUPs, & if you then see that you have (virtually) empty directories, with the exception of particular files/types - say, thumbs.db, then use a tool to search that tree, finding all thumbs.db, note their sizes, & if all seems reasonable, then delete them in mass.

Everything search engine can do that quickly an easily.

At that point, you would still have empty directories laying around. A file manager, a number of them, will enumerate subdirectory tree sizes. So if they are 0 bytes, it makes it a relatively simple matter to highlight & delete the same.

Or a tool like this, Remove Empty Directories (untested).