Help! Copied 10,000 files to the desktop

[not4nutin]

HI,

I'm writing for a friend so I'm going to try to give as much info as I can. And yes... it IS really for my friend...lol

OK. She has an IMAC 1.8 Ghz Power PC G5 running OS X 10.4.11 with 2 gb of DRAM.
She is a photographer and purchased an external hard drive to store images on. She opened iPhoto, did a "select all" and dragged 10,000 images (mostly high res files) out of iPhoto and over the external hard drive icon for everything to copy. Well...she MISSED the hard drive icon and all the photos copied to the desktop instead.

She freaked out and at some point just pulled the plug on the computer... I know...not the best move. When she restarted the computer, it was extremely slow but she eventually got it to open. She can open programs use her email/internet but it's really running slow. She has to wait after every move she makes.

Her desktop is just the blue background...no icons on it including her hard drive. If she opens her desktop folder, it lists 10,000 items. I told her to try and throw out a couple of the images and she said when she moves them to the trash, it says that they can't be put into the trash because they are in use by another program. She has about 40gb left on her hard drive.

I had her restart in safe mode and run /sbin/fsck -f and it fixed a couple of problems. She ran it again and it said everything was ok. She restarted the computer and it was still in the same state.

Before I help her troubleshoot any further, I wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions on how to solve this.

Thank you in advance!

 

[Mikuro]

If she can manage to load Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities), these commands should help:

mkdir ~/images_from_desktop
mv ~/Desktop/*.jpg ~/images_from_desktop

That will move all the JPEGs from the Desktop into a new folder in her Home folder. From there you should be able to easily do whatever you want with them in the Finder.

 

[barhar]

01. Your friend (and not the only one) has had a first hand experience aspect of the incompetence of the 'Finder's development team.

02. Your friend, whether freaking out or not, should have never pulled the AC cord.

03. Since the type of the images was not explicitly stated, I would suggest entering (as a single command line) ...

mkdir ~/Desktop/files_from_desktop; mv ~/Desktop/*.* ~/Desktop/files_from_desktop

... into 'Terminal' (yes, in the '/Applications/Utilities/' folder), and press the '<return> key.

To access the 'Utilities' folder directly, with 'Finder' as the front most process - select 'Finder's 'Go, Utilities' menu item ('Command <shift> U').

Instead of creating a folder in the current users' 'Users' folder (as will be - via 'Mikuro's code, with 'images_from_desktop' as its title'), a folder titled 'files_from_desktop' will be created on the 'Desktop'; and, all files on the 'Desktop' with a period within its file name (such as to separate the actual file name from the pre-1980's Windoze style extension [now a revolutionary idea from Apple Inc.]) will be placed into the 'files_from_desktop' folder.