Copying and Moving Images

Procedure

You can copy and move images between drives and folders in much the same way as you do in Windows Explorer. First select the thumbnails of the images that you want to copy or move. Then use one of the following methods:

Choose Copy (Ctrl/C) for copy or Cut (Ctrl/X) for move from the Edit menu.
Navigate to another location, or select a different PMIO browser.
Choose Paste (Ctrl/V) from the Edit menu.

Left-click on the thumbnails and drag them to either another PMIO browser, the Location Navigator (top left panel) or one of the shortcuts (bottom left panel). The default operation is move. Hold down the Ctrl key to do a copy instead. Watch the mouse pointer; a symbol indicates that a copy will be performed.

Choose Copy To Folder... or Move To Folder... from the Image menu.
In the dialog that appears, type a folder name (or click Browse).
Click the Copy (or Move) button. Note: If the target folder you have specified does not exist, the button will be marked Create Folder, and clicking it will create the new folder and then perform the copy (or move).

What to do if a problem occurs

Usually, the operation will be successful. If you have insufficient disk space or a disk error occurs, you will get an error message. A more usual problem is that there is a file name conflict. This means that one or more of the files you are copying already exist at the destination. If a conflict occurs you will see the following window:

If you are sure that you don't want to keep the destination image, you can simply click Replace. Usually, you won't be sure, and in that case you can either:

Click Cancel, rename the offending source file and try again

Click 'Advanced mode' to see what's going on in more detail.

Advanced conflict handling

If you click 'Advanced mode', the window will change to something like this:

There are five possible things that can be happening during a copy or move operation, and the relevant one(s) will be highlighted with a small button next to it. The button allows you to delve deeper into the situation and get a new window:

In the above diagram, the button is depressed so you can also see the thumbnails corresponding to the source and destination images in a small Thumbnail Palette at the top-right. Now you can easily see if you really want to overwrite the destination image(s). The list on the left shows all the source and destination file names, and selecting one shows you the corresponding thumbnails on the right. In addition, you can uncheck the files that you don't want to copy or move, and keep checked the ones that you do. Then, when you finally click Replace on the original dialog box, only the checked files will be affected. All this is only useful when you have multiple conflicts, as can happen when you are trying to copy a whole folder.

Avoiding conflicts

If you are like me, you might name all your image files 0001.jpg, 0002.jpg etc. When you try to copy images to another folder, you keep getting conflicts. If you are someone who doesn't care what the file names of your images are, you can avoid conflicts altogether by switching on Smart conflict handling in General Preferences (F10). This works by modifying the file names of conflicting files so that they no longer conflict. After doing a copy or move, you will find files called, for example, 0001(1).jpg. The only problem with this approach is that when copying lots of files around you may get so complacent that you will start duplicating images without realising it.