I'm looking for a free and recommended program that will compare two directories in Win7.

I've been importing photos from an old HDD to a new one via lightroom, so they have an identical date based file structure rather than the mish-mash one they currently have. I have 14885 photos on the old drive but only ~14200 after the import. I know some of the files will be .xmp but these would only account for about 150 missing files.

A couple of my oldest photos did have missing date information so I'm wondering if that could be an issue, however I don't want to have to look at each one.

TIA

I know there's software which will search for duplicate files, but the last time I used it I found it crashed if there were too many. Bad memory management

Simplest approach is to produce a spreadsheet with two columns, one for each directory. It should be quite easy to go through them then.

Open a command prompt in each of the directories and type dir *.* /s /b /on > files.txt

That will generate text files you can import into your spreadsheet of choice. Use *.jpg or whatever instead if you want to filter.

I used something that worked quite well four years ago, but can't for the life of me remember the name.

I'll have a play with that method JJ, hopefully it will list the folders as well as the files to save on a few searches.

the /s recurses through sub-directories. If you have a complicated folder structure, it might not be very pretty. Do dir /? at the prompt to see what other options might give you the best data to work with.

sigh's contentedly. those were the days.

After slogging through the data I've found a few files that weren't copied as they appear to be corrupt. The XMP files weren't moved either, LR may have combined them with the NEF when it created the DNG, but no big loss if it hasn't as I'll have to give them all a house clean anyway.

Problem is that I'm still short on files.

Files Folders
D:\ 14316 671
F:\ 14875 318

Taking into account the 191 that I've already mentioned I'm still looking for 368. JJ's method should have listed everything in that folder, and I then went through all of that confirming the missing files side by side. What the hell is going wrong?

I may have to try a more brute force type approach. Now where's that hammer?