Deleting 30,000 folders of thumbnails!?

Question

Hey all,
I have a hairy problem: after three years of mismanagement and switching between applications (Lightroom and Aperture), I have a horrendously disorganized photo library including 40,000 photographs, ~30,000 of which are thumbnails that I need to delete. Now, all of the thumbnails are located in identically named "Thumbnails" files deep (8 folders or so down) within my photo directory. It is a total mess.
I am trying to just do a spotlight search for "Thumbnails" within my "Photo" folder, and this brings up about 30,000 entries. These are all located on an external drive, so when I choose select all, Finder brings up the beachball and works for ten minutes before I can do ANYTHING else. Then, if I want to right click and check "send to trash," it takes 20 minutes to register the right click, and freezes up my computer entirely to try to send all of these to the trash.
I have been trying to just grab 1000 or 2000 of each and delete a few thousand a day, but my computer is still crashing often as a result. Is there a better way?
Thank you!
Alec

Answer 1

Working with tens of thousands of files can be a problem as you are finding out. Are you at all Unix savy? This is fairly advanced stuff if you never saw the terminal window before. If you are not comfortable doing this find a 14 year old unix guru to help you.
I use the Unix "find" command for handling massive amounts of files like this. Type... man find ...in the terminal window to see the man page for find. find recurses through the subdirectories looking for the files you specify and pipes the output to other commands. In this example I find a directory named Thumbnails and do something to it.
(I assume what you mean is there are directories named Thumbnails containing the small images scattered all over your Photo drive. )
As a test get into the terminal window and type...
cd Photo
(or whatever the path is to get into your Photo directory. It might be under /Volumes/Photo or something similar if its an external drive)
cut and paste this in the terminal window...
find . -name Thumbnails -type d -exec ls -l {} \; | more
This command is non destructive and will find all the directories under your current location called Thumbnails (case is important) and run the ls (list) command on them. It will list all files inside all the Thumbnails directories, a page at a time. Use the spacebar to scroll the pages. Ctl-C to quit. Get rid of the... | more ...to just have it scroll.
I ALWAYS do this listing before doing anything destructive with find just to see what is being found. The files listed out will be the ones that will be erased with the next command.
The dot after find means start in the current directory. Make sure you are in the correct directory!
OK it would be a really good idea to make sure your backup of Photo is up to date before doing this.
This command will find and erase ALL directories named Thumbnails under your current directory along with all the files and subdirectories inside Thumbnails. The rm -rf means recurse through each Thumbnails directory it finds and erase everything including the directory itself. the -type d means only find directories named Thumbnails not files named Thumbnails.
This one is very destructive!
MAKE SURE you are in the Photo directory and type this...
find . -name Thumbnails -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;
After a few moments all directories under Photo named Thumbnails will be gone