Share "My Pictures"

Warning... this may be a "boring post" so feel free to skip :) ..I know Jen always skips over any of my "technical" posts event though these types of post are not really targeted towards "technical" people but rather those that use technology and may not know how to get the most out of it.

I really prefer to have separate accounts for each person in the family that uses the computer. This way each person can have their own file organization, internet favorites, etc. Plus then you don't have to constantly log the other person out of your internet mail account just so you can use yours.

However, I really don't like having pictures downloaded from our camera randomly land in the "My Pictures" folder (now called only "Pictures") of the person who happened to be downloading the pictures that day. This puts you in the situation where you always have to look through at least two accounts for the picture you want... plus I believe Vista won't have the other user's pictures indexed when accessed under a different user account, so searching will be much slower as well.

I recently wiped my hard drive and reinstalled Vista... this was with the intent of moving away from a dual booted XP and Vista machine into a computer with only one OS the new and improved Vista (trumpet fanfare). Jen had previously been familiar with using separate accounts under XP, but whenever the computer was booted into Vista she would only use my account. In order to break this habit I not only created her an account with her usual name and password, I also decked it out with a new background image I thought she would like and a bundle of Vista gadgets that I thought would suit her taste... including the Flower Clock. She was impressed.

So the last thing to solve was the how to have both of our user accounts share the same "Pictures" folder. Unix has had the notion of "links" for a long time, but that concept has not really existed in windows at least not as a built in feature. In windows I could create a "shortcut" in Jen's Pictures folder titled something like "Jason's Pictures" that would then jump the user into my Pictures folder and likewise create another shortcut in my folder jumping to Jen's. However, this doesn't really solve the problem the pictures are still going to be scattered thought out both locations.

The problem is increased due to the easiness of the picture import tool in Vista which with very few clicks will import all of your pictures into the "Pictures" folder of the currently active account. This means that it's unlikely that Jen or I would take the time to tell Vista.. "No, actually I want you to import the pictures into the folder pointed to by this shortcut."

The solution is to create a "junction point". NTFS has included support for junctions for some time but there was no built in utility for creating them. You had to download the resource kit or support tools in order to get the appropriate tools for doing so. Not so with Vista... a new command was added called "mklink". Some of the features of junctions were also modified to make them mimic UNIX links more closely.

There are three different types of links you can create using mklink:

1. A "symbolic link" which is kind of similar to a shortcut, except that it actually works from the command line and not only the GUI.
2. A "hard link" in which the link is really just another name for the target. For instance if I create a file called a.txt and a hard link to the file called b.txt both a.txt and b.txt are two names for the same file. If I delete one then the other will be deleted as well.
3. A "directory junction" which is a hard link from one directory to another. That is like in the example above if I create a directory a_dir and a directory junction b_dir then both a_dir and b_dir will look like separate directories but the contents will be the same.

Naturally I used mklink to create a directory junction to solve the "Pictures" folder dilemma. I moved all of the pictures on our computer into the "Pictures" folder on my account. I then deleted the empty "Pictures" folder on Jen's account and then in Jen's user folder I created a directory junction called "Pictures" with my "Pictures" folder as the target. Now when Jen logs into her account and clicks on the word "Pictures" on her start menu it will jump into what looks like her "Pictures" folder, but is really a junction into my "Pictures" folder. More importantly when Jen connects the camera to the computer and says import these pictures they will all be dropped into the correct folder.

Here is the command line I used:

mklink /J C:\users\jenofarc\Pictures C:\users\joswing\Pictures

Note: In order for this to work Jen's user account has to have access to my "Pictures" folder. If you need help doing this just ask me in a comment.

I did the same thing for videos as well. I've considered doing it for music also to create one flat music collection on our computer... but then I realized I don't really want "Jenny Phillips" showing up in my music collection ;)

I've also discontinued the use of sub-directories in the Pictures folder. I used to have a directory for every month of each year in which all the pictures that were taken during that month would live. I now use one flat pictures folder with no sub folders. I then use Vista's built in "Photo Gallery" to view the pictures. It has links on the side that you can use to view pictures based on the date they were taken. So now instead of only being able to view all pictures taken in one month I can select any date period, such as all pictures taken in 2003, or October of 2002, etc. I'm also in the process of tagging all of our pictures with the names of the people in the picture as well as keywords for the activity being displayed. This enables Vista's built in search capabilities to function more appropriately when searching for pictures. When this is complete I can then simply type "Dallin black and white guitar" to find the black and white picture of Dallin playing the guitar. The search functionality also works in file open dialogs, such as trying to find the picture you want to attach to an email or upload to your blog.

Now if windows could simply do away with using backslashes for directory delimiters I think I'd be happy :)