How To Move Pictures And Documents Between Folders
Backing up your data is much easier to do once it’s been organized within folders. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all your pictures sorted by date or location under one folder called “Pictures”? And to have all your tax documents, letters, and spreadsheets organized under “My Documents”. Although that’s the ideal situation, often photos and documents are scattered throughout the computer in different drives, folders, and even on your desktop. When it comes time to backup your important data you may wonder, where is it all?
Now finding lost documents in another matter. The key is to stay organized in the first place!
In this video, I’ll show you how to move files (in this case, pictures) from one folder to another in Windows XP. The techniques shown here will work on other versions of Windows all the way from ’95 to Vista.
There are several different methods you can use to move files on your computer but I focus on the cut and paste function in this video. When you cut a file, as opposed to copying it, the original file is deleted from the source folder and you are left with only one copy in the destination folder. When moving files on your hard drive, this is usually what you want, otherwise you would create duplicates.
If you are moving files to an external hard drive, USB thumb drive, or DVD, you will most likely want to use the “copy” function which keeps the source files intact in the original folder. The “copy” function is easy to use. Just follow the video and replace “cut” with “copy”.
I titled this video “Organize Your Pictures” because its focus is on re-arranging files in your computer, not making duplicates of them. You probably have enough clutter as it is!
I have seen many instances where someone has a folder called “Old PC”, or something to that effect, which contains all the files from their old computer. There are usually documents, pictures, and music from their old PC in that folder. You can use the cut and paste function to move those files out of the Old PC folder and into the appropriate folders on your new PC. Cut and paste is also good for moving music you have downloaded with a file sharing program into the “My Music” folder. You can also use it to move documents and pictures from your Desktop and into the appropriate folders. No one likes a cluttered desktop!
Once you have all your pictures in “My Pictures”, music in “My Music”, documents in “My Documents”, etc. It’s much easier to tell your backup program to burn them to a DVD or copy them to an external hard drive.
In a future video tutorial I’ll show you how to create folders so that you can customize your organization. Windows comes built with folders for Music, Documents, and Pictures. But what if you want to group all your podcasts and downloads into folders? Well, Vista has that capability (for downloads, at least) but XP does not. Anyways, you can also create additional folders under “My Pictures” and group your pictures based on date or location. So you could create folders called “Cuba”, “Egypt”, “UK”, etc. and then put all your pictures from those vacations into those folders. Of course, you would use the cut and paste function to accomplish that 
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Tags: file, organization
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