Christmas Cards for 2013

Merry Christmas from London

Rear Window

Make an impression

It's not the photographer, it's the camera

...and the lens.

Violet Revolution

Violet Reloaded

Get up again...

History of a Violet

More about Lightroom and sqlite

If you follow the instructions in my previous post you'll note that I was actually just renaming files, not moving them. For example, I was suggesting to rename "2012/January 03" to "2012/01_03", but you can also move the entire folder to a nested subfolder, replacing the space with '/', so replace "2012/January 03" with "2012/January/03".
However this requires an additional step:

• the folder "January" in LR database needs to be an entity of its own: if you blindly replace "January 03" with "January/03", LR will see folder "03" correctly as part of the catalog, but not its parent "January"; so, for example, you'll see "January (500 pictures)" in LR folder tree, but clicking on "January" you won't see anything, even with "display pictures from subfolders" enabled.
• the simplest fix for this is: copy a single jpeg file in all the folders 2013/January, 2013/February, ... 2012/January, 2012/February... 

for n in $(find . -type d -d 2 | grep "\./20"); do cp ~/Temp/test.jpg $n/; done

• then run "Synchronize folder" from LR, deselect "don't import duplicates", import all the copies of your jpeg and trash them immediately after

Lightroom folder batch-rename with sqlite

Here's a quick tutorial for doing batch-renames of folders in Lighroom 4.
Warning #1: the tutorial is written for mac, but it would possibly work with minor modifications on Windows if you have the sqlite3.exe binary available, however I cannot test it.
Warning #2: don't trust blindly what I write here, the idea is absolutely correct, but I may make mistakes while I type, or omit some steps, so backup everything before you start and don't do it unless you know what you are doing.

Let' suppose my folders are of the form "2013/January 01" and I want to change them to "2013/01_01". From LR interface, you could right-click on the folder and select "Rename", but if you have thousands of them, it would take forever.

Close LR. Open a text editor, instead, and create a plaintext file (say "print.txt"), enter 12 lines like the following:

SELECT 'mv ' || QUOTE(pathFromRoot) || ' ' || QUOTE(REPLACE(pathFromRoot, 'January ', '01_')) from AgLibraryFolder WHERE pathFromRoot LIKE '%January %';

SELECT 'mv ' || QUOTE(pathFromRoot) || ' ' || QUOTE(REPLACE(pathFromRoot, 'February ', '02_')) from AgLibraryFolder WHERE pathFromRoot LIKE '%February %';

...

Windows users should probably type 'move ' instead of 'mv ' (don't forget the space).

Now create a different plaintext file (say "update.txt"), with 12 lines like this:

UPDATE "AgLibraryFolder" SET pathFromRoot = REPLACE(pathFromRoot, 'January ', '01_') WHERE pathFromRoot LIKE '%January%';

...

Open a terminal prompt and cd to the folder where the catalog lives. Let's assume that the catalog file name is LR4.lrcat.
Enter the following commands:

cat print.txt | sqlite3 LR4.lrcat > batch_rename.sh

bash batch_rename.sh

# check that everything is ok, then:

cat update.txt | sqlite3 LR4.lrcat

rm batch_rename.sh

Windows users should write something like this:

type print.txt | sqlite3 LR4.lrcat > batch_rename.bat

batch_rename.bat

# check that everything is ok, then:

type update.txt | sqlite3 LR4.lrcat

del batch_rename.bat