How to extract downloaded images (Media Attachments ZIP) to a same folder from multiple sub-folder?

Hi, I am a new user to KoboCollect. My KoboCollect form is for gathering images. Each submission has an image and associated metadata.

I have face two problems when downloading my data each week:

  1. Each image is stored in a separate folder. So there are many (hundreds!) folders inside the zip folder when I download them. I have to them go to each folder individually to remove the JPG file and put it with the rest of my images for that week. Is there a way to extract all the JPG images to a one folder as a batch?

  2. These folders have unique names but they are not indicative of date of entry or do not have any running sequence. So each week, when I download media, it downloads all my images from past weeks and I have to go through all of these to find the ones relevant to the week’s images I need. Is there a way to download media files by date?

Thank you.

Welcome to the community, @dhanushri! Maybe you could follow the instructions outlined below to solve your issue. But please note that these solutions are based for windows users. Maybe other users could also add for other OS.

Issue 1: Deleting sub-folders and extracting only images

  • Go to download where you have download the ZIP folder that holds the images.
  • Un-ZIP the folder.
  • Go to the Un-ZIPPED folder that holds the images.
  • At the right top corner, you should see something that has Search <foldername>:
  • Then type the file type that is present in the folder you wish to extract. If it’s a JPEG file, you could simply type in JPEG in the search bar.
  • You should now see all the JPEG files from the folder.
  • Then go to Home and select Select all:
  • With this you have now selected all the JPEG files form that folder.
  • Now press CTRL+X if you want to cut or press CTRL+C if you want to copy it to a new destination.
  • Then go to a new destination.
  • Press CTRL+V to paste the images.

Now all your images are copied to a new destination.

Issue 2: Sorting the images by date

Once you have copied the images to a new folder you could always sort the images by date. For this, follow the instructions as outlined in the image shared below:

  • Right click.
  • Then select Sort by.
  • Then finally select Date.

image

Your images are now sorted by date.

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Thanks very much! Extracting the JPG files worked and this was very helpful.

For the date - unfortunately all images have the date of download from Kobo, so they can’t be sorted. However, I was able to bypass this by sorting the image file names since they are in a running order.

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Thank you @dhanushri for providing your solution with the entire community. It should be very helpful for those having the same issue.