SOLVED Innane question about libraries

[CJ Reynolds]

Greetings! My first post here...

I am using win 7, and have moved most of my library locations to folders on my D: drive, as has been my habit for years. It worked as it usually does, "renaming" my folders to microsoft's infantile "My Pictures", etc. All but 2 of them - my documents folder, which, on my d: drive is "lib" (an old unix convention, but it's what I'm used to), and my videos, which is named "video" on d: (rather than videos plural) - it kindly used the original names of those 2 folders, but uses the "My Whatever" convention for the others. This has never happened to me - I'm usually forced into the "My Whatever" scheme for all of my library folders.

This tells me that I don't HAVE to use the silly names that MS likes. However, I am unable to make the other folders behave. I've tried removing the desktop.ini files in the other folders, then moving the locations, but in the properties screens, the names of the libraries are still "My Pictures", etc., and if I try to change the name in the properties to the actual folder name, I get a message that the name is already in use, and to try another name. If I misspell the name in properties, it works, and the link in the start menu points to the correct folder.

I know this is an anal complaint and I should just get over it, but things like this bug me, and I'd like to at least understand why this is happening, and maybe even overcome it...

 

[TrainableMan]

The Library is merely a series of pointers and because the OS is designed to allow multiple users there are normally two pointers under a category, for example under Music there would be one for "My Music" & a common one pointing to "Public Music". But they can point to many folders or even be disassociated with any folders.

Personally I removed all the public folders from each category type but under videos I have C:\users\trainableman\videos, D:\movies, E:\videos, etc so that I can see videos on multiple harddrives under that library.

I am on Win 10 now but I seem to recall on Win 7 there are also dynamic pointers in C:\Users\CJReynolds\ associating things like "My Music" to C:\Users\CJReynolds\Music so "My Music" & "Music" each exist in that folder & is why you may have trouble renaming it while still in that location. But on your D drive you can call your folders anything you like and you definitely don't need the "My" whatever on your folder names.

Then for your libraries, you can add & delete libraries; so you can have D:\Video & you can delete library "videos" & then add category "Video" & associate it with d:\Video. Deleting is easy, right-click on Videos & choose delete. To see how to add libraries take a look at my tutorial HERE. In the tutorial I added "Downloads" but it would be the same principle for "Video" except you would choose "optimize the folder for Videos".

 

[CJ Reynolds]

Yes, I just learned of the process of adding/removing folders in the libraries - Looks like a perfect solution. Can't believe I've been using win7/vista for 10 years and I'm just now learning this...