FTS expression tree

[fbungarz]

Hi Vkfoto,
like Jim points out you should definitely avoid using File Explorer to move files outside PSu. Doing that unnecessarily complicates things. In your case PSu now has two references to the files - the references to the old location (a folder, where the files no longer reside) and the new location (the folder where you moved them). This means you end up with a PSu catalog that has a lot of unnecessary overhead, empty references, "blind alleys" so to speak.

Only use File Explorer to re-locate images as a last resort. And ideally even avoid moving files around too much in PSu as well. The best workflow scenario is to "design" a reasonable, standardized folder structure beforeyou even import any files into PSu. This later won't make it necessary to ever move the files.
Moving files and folders inside PSu is slow, necessarily so. That is because the database has to be updated. However, moving things outside PSu is dangerous, because it means the database references of PSu can get broken and the database becomes large, unwieldy and slow. The file system manager in PSu is not designed to be fast and efficient, it cannot be, that is not its purpose. It is not meant to be helping you sorting your files into separate physical folders. That is what the import wizard was designed for: importing in a preset folder structure and renaming files.

And: where the files actually reside is actually fairly unimportant. The physical location will become less and less irrelevant as soon as you start should be managing your files efficiently and consistently using labels. Labels are like virtual folders, helping you to sort images into several virtual locations if you like.

Now: there are two aspects here. Deleting files and removing folders should be fast, it is an operation that simply tells PSu to delete the references to these files [and, if you physically want to delete the files tells the file system to do so.] I do not understand, why deleting files would cause an error as originally described here. I do not understand, why deleting folders is excruciatingly slow (my own experience).
But I do understand, why copy-paste-move operations inside PSu are slow. It means that ALL references to these files need to be updated. And in a relational database that is a complex operation.

As far as I can tell, verifying folders was designed for quite a different scenario. Not for moving files, not for importing them, but for detecting new derivatives generated by third party programs outside PSu. The scenario: you open a file in an external editor, make a few adjustments, save it as a copy. PSu is unaware of that copy, so you use verify to detect the file. The same goes for making changes to an existing file outside PSu. PSu is unaware of these changes. Verify tells the program to update these changes.

Hope that helps,
Frank

[vkfoto]

All that moving is mainly the result of legacy storage schemes as well as filing errors that resulted in duplicate folders. That should soon come to an end as things settle down.

As for the speed or rather the lack of it when deleting files and folders, I also wonder why. When not also deleting physical files or folders, all the action takes place inside the database. In my work in asset management I'm constantly updating a massive database. Changing multiple records is not instantaneous but not that long either, compared to just removing a 100 images from PSu.

Too bad the documentation is rather thin. I would have done a lot of the file cleanup before PSu had I known.

[fbungarz]

Too bad the documentation is rather thin. I would have done a lot of the file cleanup before PSu had I known.

I agree. Mike Buckley once wrote an excellent introduction to IDI. It would be great to have someone do it for PSu
The Problem is: there is a lot going on below the hood and Hert tries to wrap it all into an intuitive, minimalist interface. The simplicity of PSu's appearance can be deceiving and discovering its complexity then is daunting.