Mass Importing Windows Games From External Drive

[Drakkorcia]

I am trying to find the quickest and easiest way to re-import a large collection of installed Windows games that are installed on a secondary drive. I tried using the Windows game importer from the tools menu but it went looking for games installed under Program Files on the system drive. I tried dragging and dropping the exe but it didn't find any metadata or launch correctly. The way I've been doing it is to simply "add game", type in the game name, Launchbox adds the metadata and then I select the application path. Works, but long and tedious. Any way to select the folder on my secondary drive and have Launchbox find all the games at once? 

[neil9000]

2 hours ago, Drakkorcia said:

I am trying to find the quickest and easiest way to re-import a large collection of installed Windows games that are installed on a secondary drive. I tried using the Windows game importer from the tools menu but it went looking for games installed under Program Files on the system drive. I tried dragging and dropping the exe but it didn't find any metadata or launch correctly. The way I've been doing it is to simply "add game", type in the game name, Launchbox adds the metadata and then I select the application path. Works, but long and tedious. Any way to select the folder on my secondary drive and have Launchbox find all the games at once? 

You can just drag and drop the .exe or shortcuts onto the Launchbox window, then when the wizard opens you choose the "None Of The Above" option which doesnt associate them with a emulator.

[Drakkorcia]

Thanks. It's still manual but a little faster. Hopefully a mass import for external drive option will be available someday. My SSD won't hold the amount of games I have.

[Lordmonkus]

What you could do is to go to root of the drive and do a search for 

*.exe

and that will filter out all the executable files. Select them all and drag them in like Neil said above. Make sure that only the game files are being imported by removing anything that you don't want imported like a config tool or something.

[neil9000]

6 minutes ago, Drakkorcia said:

It's still manual but a little faster. Hopefully a mass import for external drive option will be available someday

The problem there is many games have more than one .exe they may have a 32 and 64bit one as well as directx installs or anticheat software, so you would get a lot of non games added if you just scraped a drive for .exe's.

What i do is just have a folder on my desktop where i drop all my shortcuts.

[Drakkorcia]

Oh, awesome. Why didn't I think of that? The issue I'm having now is the exe's don't generate any metadata because of their abbreviations so I still have to edit the entry haha. Serves me right for nuking my collection on accident.

[Lordmonkus]

I like to use the shortcut method like Neil, that way I can rename them to be what they need to be for the scraper.

[neil9000]

I also backup my Game Shortcuts folder to one drive and google drive, so if i need to format i can get them back, as i currently do not install any games to my C drive.