How can I Move photos from Desktop?

[ForumScreen]

Mountain Lion running:
I accidentally (slip of the mouse) saved a few thousand pictures from iPhone to my desktop,
Tried several ways to move them into folders,
Am being frustrated at the time it takes
(about a quarter hour per 250 KB)
Is there any way to move them faster?

[12dylan34]

Originally Posted by ForumScreen

Mountain Lion running:
I accidentally (slip of the mouse) saved a few thousand pictures from iPhone to my desktop,
Tried several ways to move them into folders,
Am being frustrated at the time it takes
(about a quarter hour per 250 KB)
Is there any way to move them faster?

Open a Finder window with the folder where you want them moved to. Click on a blank spot on the desktop, then hit command+a to select all of the items on your desktop. Now hold command while clicking the items that you DON'T want moved to deselect them. When everything is selected properly, drag the selected files to the folder that you've got open.

In the future, just hit command+z (undo) right after you've made a mistake to make things go back to the way that they were.

I'm not sure that I entirely understood what you were asking for, but hopefully this helps.

[chown33]

Originally Posted by 12dylan34

... Click on a blank spot on the desktop, then hit command+a to select all of the items on your desktop.

One can also open a window that shows the files and folders on the Desktop.

In the Finder's Window menu, choose Desktop and it should open a window. Note that devices, disks, servers, etc. that might be showing on the Desktop-as-background will not be listed, only files and folders will.

With a window open to the desktop, one can then use any of the views such as List, that allow arrangement by criteria such as Arrange by Kind, then use shift-click to select ranges, and cmd-click to toggle inclusion.


EDIT
From the OP, I don't understand what this means:

(about a quarter hour per 250 KB)

Even an old floppy disk will be much faster than that, unless something is wrong. If an average picture file is 1 MB, this is saying it takes an hour to move one picture file, which is crazy.

If it meant "a quarter hour per 250k picture files", that amount of time doesn't seem unreasonable, except that 250k files is a crazy number of files.

[12dylan34]

Originally Posted by chown33

One can also open a window that shows the files and folders on the Desktop.

In the Finder's Window menu, choose Desktop and it should open a window. Note that devices, disks, servers, etc. that might be showing on the Desktop-as-background will not be listed, only files and folders will.

With a window open to the desktop, one can then use any of the views such as List, that allow arrangement by criteria such as Arrange by Kind, then use shift-click to select ranges, and cmd-click to toggle inclusion.

Yeah, actually that's an easier solution. No clue why I didn't think of that.