Move contents of subfolders up one level (hundreds of parent folders, all subfolder have the same name)

Question

Is there a built-in way (WIN7) or third-party utility I can use that will allow me to move the contents of the subfolders of my hundreds of parent folders up one level?

To illustrate:

PARENT1/gallery/filex.jpg
PARENT1/gallery/filey.jpg
PARENT1/gallery/filez.jpg
PARENT2/gallery/filex.jpg
PARENT2/gallery/filey.jpg
PARENT2/gallery/filez.jpg

What I want to do (at a single batch action, not individual per folder) is:

PARENT1/filex.jpg
PARENT1/filey.jpg
PARENT1/filez.jpg
PARENT2/filex.jpg
PARENT2/filey.jpg
PARENT2/filez.jpg

Parents have varying names, but all subfolders have the same name "gallery". Is there any quick and painless way to do this? I have roughly 650+ PARENT folders.

Answer 1

You can have Windows execute the same command for all 650 folders sequentially with a simple for /D loop. Go to the directory containing the parents and execute the following command:

for /D %i in (.\*) do @move %i\gallery\* %i\

Optionally, you can delete the empty 'gallery' folders using `rmdir' without the /S-flag, e.g.:

for /D %i in (.\*) do @(move %i\gallery\* %i\ && rmdir %i\gallery)

For more control over the file operations, you may want to look into robocopy, which is far more advanced than move. Also note that spaces in directory names are often parsed as delimiters. For example, rmdir parent 1 will remove the directories 'parent' and '1', but not 'parent 1'. If your directories contain spaces, use quotes, e.g.:

for /D %i in (.\*) do @move "%i\gallery\*" "%i\"