Copying Multiple Items to New Categories

I have currently entered about a thousand items into our site and the boss has decided that he'd like customers to be able to sort by age category as well. The solution that was come up with was to add new categories for each of the age ranges and then copy an item into the appropriate category.

Things is, there are some categories already in the system with hundreds of items that would all be copied to the say "Ages 3-4" category. Is there a way to copy batches of them at a time or does it have to go item by item?

To Copy ALL Products in one Category as Linked Products to another Category ...

Go to the Category that you want to copy from so that you can see the list of Products ...

Click on C for Copy, and on the bottom of the right side panel you will see the button for the Multiple Categories Link Manager ...

at the bottom of the screen you will see a section with:

Copy ALL Products in a Category as LINKED Products to another Category ...
Example: Using 8 and 22 would Link ALL Products in Category 8 to Category 22

NOTE: be sure to backup your database before you use global features like this ...

I just did a copy of products from a category to a category that did not exist (by mistake..).

I could not navigate to this category as it seemed to exist in some limbo, but I could display it in admin by manually typing in the cPath number.

I have deleted these linked products in this orphan category, but is there anything else I need to cleanup/check in the database?
I now can't find any reference to that category number in the database so I assume its ok...?

Check that the products_to_categories table is clean with only valid categories_id numbers ...

Make sure your Products in the products table have valid categories_id in the products_to_categories and that their master_categories_id are correct in the products table ...

ok thanks for the quick response. I can't find any reference to the errant category id so I think all is well.

I am surprised this copy to a non-existent category was allowed to take place/was not caught as an error.

Is there any reasoning why or is it just a legacy hole?

I put that in there to allow fixing of obscure issues but the message is not the clearest message to let you understand that you have done this with a Valid from categories_id but not a Valid to categories_id when you goober up with a typo rather than do it with intent ... :unsure:

Regarding the confirmation messages, a copy from and to a valid category results in a red warning message rather than a nice green success. I thought this was a bug and was going to look at it, but is that intentional too?

That is my special sort of way to say it was done but beware the the results ...

The feature will still be there but the message will be updated in a future version to provide a bigger clue ...