Marie SWE wrote: ⤴Fri Jul 22, 2022 6:58 pm
Lady Fitzgerald wrote: ⤴Fri Jul 22, 2022 6:19 pm
I may be the symlink queen here. I have well over 1200 symlinks in just my movies folder (the nested symlinks don't show up in the folder file count). My movies are spread over three data drives. I have my default player set for VLC. Instead of some fancy dancy media program that I can't figure out to use and has a lot of extra crap I don't want or need, I just made a symlink of each movie and put it into a folder in my Video folder on one of my data drives, then made a symlink to that folder on my desktop. Making the symlinks was easy. I just highlight the file or folder I want a symlink for (I can do multiple files and/or folders at the same time; there seems to be no limit on the number), then, while holding down SHIFT and CTRL at the same time, left click and drag the highlighted file(s) and/or folder(s) and drag them to where I want the symlink. That creates the symlink(s), easy peasy, slick and sleazy. I also use nested symlinks--symlinks that lead to symlinks--sometimes as much as four deep. I set the folder to display List View, unchecked all the options to view, leaving only the file or folder name, then zoomed it all the way out. Now, I can easily read the movie tiles on my TV screen from ten feet away and use a wireless mouse as a remote.
I have my movies and TV-shows on two HDD's on three partitions.. I made a own local homepage instead of my old "video-list"word document that list it all movies/shows name, category, year, and length.. it contains one link to IMDB if I or someone visiting me wants to read about the movie/show and a link to my local storage, so I just can click it and it open my media player and plays the movie.. so no shortcuts or symlinks needed.
Just a tip if you want to get away from the symlinks.
Sounds like a lot of work to me to set all that up. All I need is a place where I can browse to find a movie or TV show I want to watch, then click on it to watch it. I can go to a folder that has PDFs of the liner notes of all the movies/TV shows if I do want to see more than just the movie title (all the movies have a reference number assigned to them for cross referencing).
Making the symlinks is stupid easy. Since I've been reorganizing many of my movies and TV shows into folder to make my movie list less cumbersome, there was a chance I might have lost a link or few. To fix any missing links (pardon the pun), I started over with a new Movie folder, then, one at a time, opened up each data drive that had my movies, highlighted all of them with CTRL+A, then, while holding down SHIFT+CTRL, left clicked and dragged the lot to the new movie folder, then waited a few seconds for the drive activity to stop madly flashing me, then move on to the next drive. The entire process took less than 30 seconds, if that long (and yes, I had lost a few symlinks).
I have no reason for me to want to get away from symlinks. Those little jewels are handier than sliced bread and indoor plumbing combined. For me they are a valuable tool.