Have you ever accidentally copied 11,848 files to your desktop?

I was trying to move over 11,000 family photos from a group of folders into one main folder. Something must have slipped while I was dragging the photos over, because all 11,848 images appeared on my desktop!

Here’s how it looked on my dual screen:

Screenshot of the 11,848 files on my MacOS desktop
Second monitor displaying 11,848 files on my MacOS desktop

Some people have a messy desktop with icons covering every inch. But this is a whole new level of desktop craziness.

Why in the world am I copying 11,000 photos into one folder? This is part of my photo processing every month. I convert all my movies into frames. By default the exif metadata from this conversion sets the creation date as the date when the files are converted—not when the original movie was recorded.

I move all the frames into one folder, so I can run a command-line script to assign the proper date in the metadata of each file. Then I import the frames into Adobe Lightroom where they get automatically put into a folder for each date.

(Some day I hope to write a detailed explanation of how I pick individual frames from all my movies.)

The texture created by this many files is kinda neat. Here’s a closeup.

Rather amusing that the photos you can see are of my 10-month-old daughter riding in a wagon. It’s like my desktop is now the wagon, and she’s riding along.

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Jonathan A Hein
Jonathan A Hein
3 years ago

LOL! I’ve copied a few hundred but never more than 10K! How hard was it to clean up?

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