Hello,
I am a novice SharePoint user trying to grasp the use of SharePoint for document management and I really need some guidance. I have over 2,000 documents currently residing in a folder structure in a shared documents library. I need to revamp the site, remove the folder structure, and bulk move all the current documents to a new SharePoint library that auto-populates the document form fields with the required metadata.  I also want to group the documents by category and searchable by metadata.  Does anyone have any suggestions of how I can do this?
Which version of SharePoint are you using?
Do your folders equate to the metadata? For starters, you could use the folders to apply default values to the items in the list, and then migrate the folders to another library (or remove the folders from the current library).
You’ll want to start by applying site columns to your existing documents, for tagging. Then you’d use default column values to apply a metadata value based on the folders the files are in.
http://brainlava.com/adding-metadata-to-a-folder-in-sharepoint-2013/
From there, you can choose to either remove folders from the views or migrate the folders out of the library using the Move To functionality, or Content and Structure or through code.
