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When moving/copying large numbers of files, one often deals with different versions of the same file under the same file name.

Currently, Dolphin can only be instructed to skip all or overwrite all. This is only useful if you have a universal rule - all source files are to be kept, or all destination files are to be kept.

I would like to be able to skip or overwrite conditionally. Several different conditions would be useful, but just being able to always overwrite when files are identical would help the most.

Other conditional behaviors that I would like to have are:

- overwrite if destination file is older
- overwrite if destination file is smaller.

Thanks for listening!

Why don't you just use the search feature to select all files that you want to be overwriting and move/copy only those?

That works in simple situations where there is a global criterion that separates files into two groups (by size, by date) which are to be overwritten or not, but fails when individual comparison is required. I can search a folder structure for files, sort by date, and then select all files newer than a fixed date. I cannot select all files newer than a corresponding file on the destination I am going to move to.

The pre-selection workaround generally assumes prior knowledge of which files are newer/different/larger on the source, and sometimes requires their manual selection. Having to do this may be equivalent labor to clicking skip or overwrite in each collision case individually. This is impractical if we're dealing with hundreds or thousands of files.

Pre-selection from search has another problem: it does not work when we're dealing with a subdirectory structure since the subdirectory information is lost when we copy from a search list.

In my opinion, dolphin shouldn't ask for each file, but automatically skip and add skipped files to list in special Window. After operation is done or when it is performed, user can select file to overwrite and select it by many criteria - for example select overwrite each if newer and then unselect one or two and accept. There's important thing - file should have three state: overwrite, skip and wait. Overwrite means file would be overwrite, once user click accept, skip means file would been only removed from list, when user click accept and wait means that file would been kept in list. Each new file would be in wait state.

There can exist many criteria, like:
- Matching regular expression with name
- Matching regular expression with full path
- Older
- Newer
- etc.

I think, instead of display files in a list, we can display it in tree representing directory structure on the filesystem, so user can click overwrite/skip for each file in some directory.

Lachu wrote:In my opinion, dolphin shouldn't ask for each file, but automatically skip and add skipped files to list in special Window. After operation is done or when it is performed, user can select file to overwrite and select it by many criteria - for example select overwrite each if newer and then unselect one or two and accept. There's important thing - file should have three state: overwrite, skip and wait. Overwrite means file would be overwrite, once user click accept, skip means file would been only removed from list, when user click accept and wait means that file would been kept in list. Each new file would be in wait state.

I think that's a wonderful idea, and would greatly add to Dolphin's usefulness. Some additional ideas:

A really important overwrite condition is identical files.

Bonus functionality: for media files it would be good to have type-specific overwrite conditions. For example, for pictures, overwrite if pixel dimensions are larger (though, in most cases, overwrite if bigger size would take care of that.) This is a common situation, when you have thumbnails of pictures that were given the same names.

I would have 4 states: overwrite, skip, rename, wait.

For rename, it would be great to have regex search and replace, and other common rename options like Thunar offers.

Or perhaps the list of files could just be given to KRename. Personally, I'd like the convenience of having some common rename options to just be built-in, and to have the choice of using KRename if the common options don't work.