So you’ve made your system more efficient by putting all your family’s documents, music and photos on the WHS shared folders? Now everyone has access to them and you don’t have multiple copies of your entire CD collection or 100s of the same high res photos on several computers around the house? Well done!
The only problem is… “Honey” and “Junior” never seem to be able find them on the server. They look in their “My Photos” folder and scream “Dad, this computer stinks! All my photos are gone!”
Well, tell them to relax. With this simple trick they’ll never even have to know you moved the photos. They’ll think they are still on their own computers right in the same folder they’ve always been.
The way you do it is to remap your default PICTURE, MUSIC (and any other of the default folders you want) to point to the corresponding shared folders on Windows Home Server (truth be told you can actually remap them to any location – like another client on the network) And it’s easy. We’ll start with Pictures but the procedure is the same for any folder.
In Windows Vista:
- Open the START MENU, RIGHT click on PHOTOS and select PROPERTIES.
- Click the LOCATION TAB and hit the FIND TARGET button.
- Navigate to NETWORK > SERVER > PHOTOS.
- Click in the NAVIGATION BAR at the top of the Explorer Window. (It will change from something like “NETWORK > SERVER > PHOTOS” to \\SERVER\PHOTOS.)
- With \\SERVER\PHOTOS highlighted, RIGHT CLICK and select copy.
- Close that window and go back to the PICTURE PROPERTIES dialogue box and PASTE the path in place of the old location.
- Select APPLY.
- It will ask you if you want to “move all the files from the old location to the new location?” Make your choice.
- It’s probably easiest to move all the photos before you do this. If you have nothing left in your local photos folder then you can say “Yes” and you won’t have to worry about duplicate files or folders. However, if you want to move photos from your client computer onto your WHS windows will do that for you now.)
- Select OK and you are done.
In Windows XP
Now your computer basically thinks that the PICTURES folder on your computer is the PHOTOS folder on WHS. So when you select PICTURES from the START menu it will show you the PHOTOS folder in WHS. And when you navigate to your folders in EXPLORER the PHOTOS folder on WHS will show up next to your other local folders.
This works in applications too. So when your wife saves pictures from her camera to the PHOTOS folder in her folders they will automatically be saved to the shared folder in WHS. And when she wants to edit Pictures in her image processor, again, she simple navigates to her folders selects PHOTOS and, presto, there they are. Pretty nifty, huh?
