relinking problem

I have done this before without problem and I don't know why it's not working now. Red-tailed Hawk selected videos were originally in a general folder, Non-passerinies. Once selected for project, I move to a subfolder, Red-tailed Hawks, so that I know they have been used and won't be again. I press the red link button and it shows the folder Non-passerines and then I navigate to the subfolder Red-tailed Hawks, where I've verifed by looking that they are in there. But the dialog closes and says 34 files not found, still showing the Non-Passerines, like it never left. I definitely went to choose the folder multiple times, and same result. Now instead I am letting it search multiple hard drives unecessarily with thousands of folders not knowing how long that will take.

This has been reported before. Here's an example: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=165698

and possibly-related: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=164265

5 hours later and at 8252 folders, and still looking, can't go 2 subfolders below and find the files. ridiculous. Wasted my whole day, still waiting for it to finish all the folders on drives.
8348.

What if you kept all these files in a specific folder? Then you'd have to relink to ONE folder and not dozens (or hundreds) of folders.

I'm totally OCD, but I keep my source folders arranged as follows:

Project_name_date
>Camera_Files
>>Red
>>Alexa
>>BMD
>>DJI_Zoom (etc.)
>Color
>Deliverables
>EDLs_&_XMLs
>Fixes
>Graphics
>Misc.
>Notes
>Scans
>Sound
>>Dialogue
>>Music
>>FX
>>Stems
>>Finals
>>VO
>Stills
>Stock
>Titles
>Trailers
>Transcodes
>VFX

Everybody has their own personal preferences for project files, and many different methods can work. I stay on top of this as much as possible so that when new files come in, or if the session becomes unlinked, I can quickly and easily solve the problem. You can rework this layout and make it as simple or complex as you need.

Boot drive only has OS and applications. External drives have source files and backup session. We use a 4TB SSD for Gallery/Cache files, and a different external computer for the PosgreSQL server.

Digital Rebellion's PostHaste will do this automatically if you like to work that way. I have manually-prebuilt templates that do the same thing, but their ideas are good (and it's free):

https://www.digitalrebellion.com/posthaste/

Note that with H.264 material, the potential for file name conflicts and the lack of embedded timecode can create havoc in post. For a lot of reasons, we try to avoid both.

At about 2:30 pm on the 2nd day, it was almost 19,000 folders searched. So about 28 hours, I was going to give up, but when I came back after a few minutes away from that check, I wondered where the progress window was and then I saw that it had thumbnails again instead of red blanks. searched all those big hard drives when it was only 2 subfolders down from previously. Curiously I did the same move on the previous video and the relinking worked correctly.

Did you accidentally start a deep search?

Sounds like he intentionally started a deep search because the regular relinking methods wouldn't relink to his files even though he pointed them to the correct new folder.

Yes it was intentional, and it said it would take some time, but 28 hours was more than I expected. Next time, I will try rebooting the computer and see if that works. This was extremely inefficient.