Newbie .. organizing music and photos

[donl1150]

I am in the process of trying to convert from years of PC’s use to a MacBook Air. So far I love it but am taking it slowly.

Two of the projects I want to do are organizing both music and photos. The other day I worked on music using iTunes. I have about 10,000 songs on a NAS. I have them all in one folder. I have a Sonos system that I directed to that NAS folder and it found them all….no issues. The music streams nicely throughout the house.

I then imported that folder all into iTunes which took about 6 hours. Now I can easily sync my iDevices with only songs I want on them.

Question 1: I think this process has resulted in duplicate folders, thus 20,000 songs on the NAS. Can I delete the original folder and songs then redirect my Sonos to the new iTunes folder?

Now it’s time to work on photos. Again, they are all on the NAS but who knows how many folders and where exactly they are! It has been years of saving … to different spots unfortunately. Undoubtedly there are many duplicates in there as well. I assume the best practice is to put them all in one folder with subfolders.

Question 2: Is there a program out there that will search, find and relocate them or is this a manual process?

Once this is done, I will import into iPhoto for tagging, deleting duplicates etc.

Question 3: Will this result in a duplicate set of pictures like the music did in iTunes?

I assume the last step would be to import to iTunes for syncing various photos to my various iDevices.

Question 4: Will this result in yet a third set of pictures…..or am I not understanding how iTunes and iPhoto deals with files?

Any advice on the issue from Mac experts would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Don

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Can I delete the original folder and songs then redirect my Sonos to the new iTunes folder?

Safety First! Redirect Sonos to the new iTunes folder and test the results before you delete anything from the NAS.

Question 3: Will this result in a duplicate set of pictures like the music did in iTunes?

Both iTunes and iPhoto are databases. There's a database record for each song/image, and that record includes the directory path to the media file. That path can be inside the iTunes/iPhoto library, or not. You can copy media files into the library, or not. "Import" does not necessarily mean "copy."

Both iTunes and iPhoto have settings that determine whether files you Import will be copied:

iTunes Preferences > Advanced > Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library

iPhoto Preferences > Advanced > Importing: Copy items to the iPhoto Library

Getting back to Question 1: If those options have been checked, then yes, you can delete the files from the NAS once the process is done... as long as you're sure you really do have a copy of everything in your iTunes and iPhoto libraries.

If the option is not checked, it means iTunes and iPhoto are linking to wherever the files happen to be. Things can get pretty messy if you do that - I'm heartily in favor of automatically copying files into the centralized iTunes and iPhoto libraries.

You may want to spot-check to be sure iTunes and iPhoto are actually accessing the files from their respective libraries (rather than from the NAS or other locations outside of the libraries). There are several ways to do this, but the most direct may be to click-select a song/image and use File menu > Show in Finder/Reveal in Finder.

Question 4: Will this result in yet a third set of pictures…..or am I not understanding how iTunes and iPhoto deals with files?

No. iTunes does not "import" and/or make copies of image files - when you choose your iTunes Sync options for Photos, you select the external source of the images you'll be syncing to your iOS devices. For the sake of syncing image files, iTunes is simply a conduit between the source of the images and your iOS devices. This is an exception to the "Copy files..." option mentioned above (and the only exception).

IMPORTANT: Do not move a file once it's been imported. Anytime you physically move a file, whether you're poking around inside the iTunes/iPhoto libraries, or linking to files outside of those libraries, the song/image will be "lost" - the programs do not track changes to the location of those files.