Please help with merging the contents of subfolders and deleting the parent folders.

[jawndoh]

I've reached out to apple to no avail, so here goes:

I have a parent folder "Food".
inside the parent folder are three folders
Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner

now inside of the three folders are hundreds of folders of recipes.
so, breakfast has 200 folders of individual recipes
lunch has 500 folders of individual recipes and
dinner has 1,000 folders of individual recipes.

my question is, how do I consolidate/merge all of the recipe files to circumvent the parent folders inside of each parent folder without dragging and dropping each individual recipe or manually clicking on each recipe then copying and pasting.



here's an example.

thanks for your help folks, I'm open to using automator.

 

[DeltaMac]

It will take some time.
There might be some third-party solution with some file directory specialist app (where I don't have any useful opinions)
But - you COULD Command-click on each recipe file, which will select those files, in each subfolder, until you have "enough" selected. Then drag the selected files to the top level/parent folder. Delete the emptied sub-folders as you go. I probably would not do more than 15 or 20 files/folders before dragging out the files to the parent folder. (Why would you need to copy and paste files, when you are still on the same volume?)
I would probably start fresh with new parent folders (Breakfast clean-up, Winner Dinner, Lunch bunch), so you are not confused by dragging everything within the same parent folders, and losing your place. Not saying you might do that, but going to a completely different set of folders might be a quicker completion, maybe with less confusion, particularly when you start moving all those recipes in the Dinner folder.

 

[ab22]

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8385501 and similar thread suggestions on that page

or you can get more hands-on using (say) Find any File app to search within a folder for Kind is not Folder; select all results & Copy; then Finder - Edit menu - Paste or (option key) Move the results to some new folder arrangement.

 

[kryten2]

thanks for your help folks, I'm open to using automator.

Automator :

Get Specified Finder Items, add your Food folder --> Get Folder Contents --> Move Finder Items.

 

[adrianlondon]

I'm confused with wording like "parent folder inside parent folder". Not that it matters, but clarify whether you want every single recipe in "Food" or for them to still be in three separate meal folders.

This can easily be done in the terminal, but you'd need to be comfortable using the terminal. It can also be done relatively easily in Finder.

In Finder, open a tab to Breakfast. Open a second tab and go into "Breakfast" again, and search for "." then just drag every file into the first tab. After that, you can delete all the empty subfolders. Ensure in Finder Settings / Advanced that the option to show folders on top is selected.

If searching for "." doesn't list all your Breakfast recipes/files, ensure in Advanced that "Show all filename extensions" is ticked. I don't know if that's necessary as I've never not had that option ticked.

 

[jawndoh]

Automator :

Get Specified Finder Items, add your Food folder --> Get Folder Contents --> Move Finder Items.

this worked, on the first try, and extremely efficiently. thank you very much.