Creating an Automated Upload Solution for Moving Files

Many of the workers I support in my company spend part of each day capturing digital photographs in the field. The workers move the images from local flash cards to a NAS device. I have two problems. First, my users find it tedious to copy their files to the network every few days. Second, they don't use consistent names for the folders they copy the files to. Each field worker has a parent directory that identifies the name of the user moving the files. Below that level, each user creates a subdirectory each time he or she moves files to the network. However, the subdirectory names differ from user to user and even from one upload to the next. I'm looking for a script that will automate and simplify the upload process and that uses some identifying file characteristics to uniquely and consistently name the subdirectory for each set of files each user moves. Can you help me find such a solution?

This question was particularly interesting to me because for months, I've been promising my wife that I'll build a script to quickly and easily move image and movie files from a flash drive to unique folders on a shared network. When I asked my colleagues whether they thought such a script would be useful, the universal response was, "Man, when you get that thing written, send it to me!" But it took this reader's question to get me going. I carefully framed my answer and the resulting script, FilesUp load.wsf, to address the submitted question. You can download the complete-script from the Windows Scripting-Solutions Web site. See page 1 for download information. I think you'll find this script useful beyond the specific scenario the question describes. . . .