I had a folder with all my photos and videos in it – some 50,000 files in 560 folders. I decided to move all the videos to a new folder, but wanted to maintain the same folder structure for the videos as for the photos.

Obviously they weren’t all in a single folder, they were randomly across the 560 folders.

I spent a while working out how to do this, so thought I’d share it. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it does work!

First, I used SyncEXP (hit the download link at the top of the page) to copy all the videos to the new folder, preserving the folder structure. SyncEXP is a great little tool for syncing files amongst local/network drives.

You need to hit ‘advanced options’ and then filter on file types. I filtered on *.avi and *.AVI – not sure if it’s case specific or not, but better safe than sorry.

Once the copies are made, you can use any number of methods to delete the originals. You could do it via a search in Windows Explorer or some other tool. I used Directory Opus which has some cool features for renaming/filtering/searching files etc (originally tried to get this to move the files but didn’t find a way to do it with it).