[mediahound]

How do I change the default Pictures folder to another drive? It's currently on my internal hard drive and I want to store all pictures on my 2nd hard drive. For example, when I plug in my digital camera, the pictures are downloaded with Imaga Capture to my Pictures folder that is on my int. hard disk. I want this folder to be on my 2nd hard disk.

Anyone know how this might be accomplished?

[moki]

Copy the pictures folder to your external drive, then delete the original folder. Next, make an alias to the Pictures folder on your external drive, copy the alias to your home directory where the Pictures folder was, then rename the folder from "Pictures alias" to "Pictures"

[Chuckit]

I feel a bit sheepish contradicting Andrew, but isn't that precisely how not to do it? Copying an alias between volumes breaks the alias.

What I would say to do is do everything he says up until you make the alias. Instead of making the alias on the external drive, drag the Pictures folder into your Home folder, making sure to hold apple-option when you drop it. This will cause the alias to be created in your Home folder and it will work correctly.

[moki]

hrm. Copying an alias across volumes never used to break it -- does it now?

[Diggory Laycock]

Works for me - on my desktop I have my movies folder as an alias to a directory on a second HD.

[philzilla]

i just made symlinks for ~/Movies & ~/Music on my other drive

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by moki:
hrm. Copying an alias across volumes never used to break it -- does it now?

I just tried it, and as I thought, the alias I'd copied onto my hard drive didn't work (while one created by command-option-dragging did). Somehow I'd been of the impression that aliases have always been a little flaky across volumes, though...

[moki]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
I just tried it, and as I thought, the alias I'd copied onto my hard drive didn't work (while one created by command-option-dragging did). Somehow I'd been of the impression that aliases have always been a little flaky across volumes, though...

Aliases contain all of the information they need to work across volumes -- that's crazy that it didn't work. Time to file a bug...

[philm]

I think this question boils down to the difference between an alias and a symbolic link. I don't undestand much more than that....hopefully others will wade in with the details.

[Stefan]

Originally posted by mediahound:
How do I change the default Pictures folder to another drive? It's currently on my internal hard drive and I want to store all pictures on my 2nd hard drive. For example, when I plug in my digital camera, the pictures are downloaded with Imaga Capture to my Pictures folder that is on my int. hard disk. I want this folder to be on my 2nd hard disk.

Anyone know how this might be accomplished?

you could also set a mount point for your your 2nd hd. in 10.2 this is done with the NetInfoManager - don't know about panther. i would, however, only do this if you always have the drive plugged in.

[ShotgunEd]

Isn't it about time apple implemented aliases using symbolic links?

[moki]

Originally posted by ShotgunEd:
Isn't it about time apple implemented aliases using symbolic links?

No... symbolic links are much more fragile.

[ShotgunEd]

Really? I had assumed the opposite. In what way fragile?

[Chuckit]

Symlinks are basically just file paths. If you move or rename the file, the symlink breaks.

Code:
ChuckMac:~/tmp chuck$ echo "Hello World" > testfile.txt
ChuckMac:~/tmp chuck$ ln -s testfile.txt ta.txt
ChuckMac:~/tmp chuck$ mv testfile.txt helloworld.txt
ChuckMac:~/tmp chuck$ less ta.txt
ta.txt: No such file or directory

Like Andrew said, aliases ought to be able to handle being moved around gracefully. They're much more resilient than symlinks. There just seems to be a bug with moving them across volumes.

And now with further testing, I've found that the bug is more specific than I'd initially thought. It only happens with aliases to directories, and it doesn't actually break the alias completely — Finder just can't recognize the alias as pointing to a directory. So you can open it in icon view, but in column view and list view, it just treats the alias like a normal flat file.

[moki]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
And now with further testing, I've found that the bug is more specific than I'd initially thought. It only happens with aliases to directories, and it doesn't actually break the alias completely — Finder just can't recognize the alias as pointing to a directory. So you can open it in icon view, but in column view and list view, it just treats the alias like a normal flat file.

I've seen it do this for remote volumes -- ie, AppleShare-mounted volumes -- but never local drives. Strange.