From a large file how to extract only certain files?

Question

Hello,

First i apologize for most likely describing this poorly!

I'm trying to create a new smaller file from a large file folder that has ~10,000 pictures inside of it without manually copying the folder and deleting each, as the pix are updated annually so we'd have to do this every year.

There are ~3,500 separate properties but ~10,000 pictures. So ideally i would like a new separate file with only the first picture of the first building.

They are labeled in this manner: K=property. B=Building; P=Photo . There are ~3500 K's. then each k can have multiple buildings and then each building can have multiple photos. For Example:

k1b1p1 (this is the first picture of bldg 1 on property 1-Really what i'm looking to extract but for each "K"); k1b1p2, (this is the 2nd picture of bldg 1 on property 1); k2b1p1(is Property 2-building 1-picture1); k2b1p2; k2b2p1, etc.

If this helps and is simpler-My coworker just said.. what we really want is to extract or isolate the files ending with b1p1 but for each K.

Any kind of assistance would really be appreciated and save us lots of time!

Answer 1

Hello,

You could try using the ? mark to replace the first set of number. Use a question mark for each digit to be replaced

Copy k?b1p1

copy k??b1p1

etc

Darrell

Answer 2

Powershell can do this. The main question would be the format of the values of K,B,P. That is, is a K always the first n number of characters in the file name? Or can a K value be of different lengths? K01, K999, K1234. How would you determine where the value of B starts? If they are fixed lengths, then that's easy.

Here's a sample. I have a folder of jpg's and they are all named in the format yyyymmdd_tttttt. Like 20240829_091244.jpg. I want to organize all the photos that I took in August for any year. So I want an August folder, and then subfolders for 2023,2024,2025, etc.

$Source = "C:\Temp\XXXX\zzzzz"
$Dest = "C:\Temp\XXXX\new"               
$files = Get-ChildItem $Source
foreach ($f in $files) {
    "Base file name is {0}" -f $f.BaseName
    $year = $f.BaseName.Substring(0,4)      # get the first 4 characters from the name 
    "Year is {0}" -f $year
    $month = $f.BaseName.Substring(4,2)     # the 5th and 6th characters are the month 
    "Month is {0}" -f $month
    $target = "{0}\{1}\{2}" -f $Dest, $month, $year
    "Copy this file to {0}" -f $target
    if ((Test-Path $target) -eq $false) {     # does folder exist?
         "Creating folder {0}" -f $target
        New-Item $target -ItemType Directory
    }
    $f | Copy-Item -Destination $target        # Use move-item if you want to remove the file from the source. 
    ""
}

I end up with a folder structure like this.

C:\Temp\XXXX>tree
Folder PATH listing for volume OS
Volume serial number is 36C0-6121
C:.
├───new
│   ├───08
│   │   └───2024
│   └───09
│       └───2024

Running the script in Powershell_ISE looks like this.

You would need to modify the script to parse for the K,B,P values and then build the destination folder name that you require.

I recommend copying a few files to a temporary folder that you can use as a source to test with. Verify that the files are copied to the correct folder. Use Powershell's "-whatif" switch to test the copy without actually doing the copy (or move).

Make sure that you have a backup of the folder that has the 10,000 files in case something goes wrong.

Comment out the copy-item and run the script against the 10,000 files to verify that you can parse each name correctly.

Answer 3

Hello

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum

You need to extract the first picture of the first building for each property. Let’s use a script to help with that. Here’s a simple Python script to get you started:

import os

import shutil

source_folder = 'path_to_your_folder'

destination_folder = 'path_to_new_folder'

if not os.path.exists(destination_folder):

os.makedirs(destination_folder)

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(source_folder):

files_sorted = sorted(files)

for file in files_sorted:

if file.endswith('b1p1.jpg'): # Adjust the file extension if needed

property_code = file.split('b')[0] # Extracts the property code (e.g., k1 from k1b1p1)

if not any(f.startswith(property_code) for f in os.listdir(destination_folder)):

shutil.copy(os.path.join(root, file), destination_folder)

break

Change path_to_your_folder to the path of the folder containing your pictures.

Change path_to_new_folder to the path where you want to save the extracted pictures.

Adjust the file extension if needed.

This script will walk through your folder, check for files ending with 'b1p1', and copy the first matching file for each property to the new folder.

Give it a try and see if it meets your needs!

Best regards

Yanhong

=====================================

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Answer 4

thanks so much. Unfortunately this did not work exactly however i was able to do something similar and fix my issue. In similar fashion, within the folder i searched for *b1p1 and this gave me all the files that ended in b1p1. then as some had p10 through p19 i searched for *b1p1.jpg and it gave me what i needed. Then i selected all ctrl-A and copied ctrl-c; and then created a new file and pasted ctrl-v. and it gave me all what i needed. Thank you very much Darrell for taking time and helping me i really appreciate your time! Sincerely, jon