Windows 7: My Pictures and Library - what's the difference?

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simonmlewis
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Windows 7: My Pictures and Library - what's the difference?

Post by simonmlewis »

Hi

I just had a worrying moment thinking I had lost a load of pictures, then I found that the Library of My Pictures (that you get within Start/MyPictures) and users/name/mypictures are totally different.

How is it best to manage these?? As I thought all my pictures were in users/name/my pictures, but the missing ones were in fact in Library.

Simon
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Celauran
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Re: Windows 7: My Pictures and Library - what's the differen

Post by Celauran »

They're not totally different as such. Libraries in Windows 7 can display the contents of multiple directories as though they were a single directory. The Pictures library contains, by default, user\name\Pictures and user\Public\Pictures I believe.

This may be of interest.
simonmlewis
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Re: Windows 7: My Pictures and Library - what's the differen

Post by simonmlewis »

So when I go to "Start My Pictures", and I see a folder structure of:

Pictures
> My Pictures
> Pictures

And in the right pane I see all my picture subfolders, what's happening there?

I ask this as I thought I had lost some important files, and they weren't in My Pictures, but in Libraries instead, and I found it in my backup.

It was in one place, but NOT where it should have been. So frustrating to have two locations for these files.
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Celauran
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Re: Windows 7: My Pictures and Library - what's the differen

Post by Celauran »

By default, your Pictures library contains My Pictures and Public Pictures, that's it. By default, dragging items into your Pictures library will place them in My Pictures. This is configurable, though. I cannot speculate on what changes you may have made or which directories now compose your Pictures library. I had hoped that the above link might explain a little how libraries work and, thus, perhaps offer you some clues as to how your photos ended up where they did as well as to help avoid similar difficulties in the future. Removing all directories except My Pictures would effectively disable the library, which I suppose is also an option.
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