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General discussion

My Pictures, two locations

Jun 4, 2012 10:37PM PDT

On my XP SP3 PC I have two My Pictures folders. One is located as a subfolder within My Documents. The other appears top right of the window that opens when you click Start. The content is not the same. One seems to accept photos loaded to my PC through my camera. The other accepts images stored from other sources such as emailed photos. Does anyone know why this is?

Discussion is locked

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Re: my pictures
Jun 4, 2012 10:42PM PDT

Nobody knows why it is setup like this, and who did it (either you or the program that came with your camera or your email program or it remembers a choice you made on some screen in 2007 or ...)

If you're not happy with the situation, change the setup so it does what you want.

Kees

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Are you sure?
Jun 5, 2012 10:22PM PDT

On my XP system when I open the My Pictures shortcut in the Start Menu I see that the path to this location is;

C:\Documents and Settings\{AccountName}\My Documents\My Pictures

where {AccountName} is the name of the account I logged in to Windows with.

When I open My Documents then open the My Pictures sub-folder in there, the path is the same, eg;

C:\Documents and Settings\{AccountName}\My Documents\My Pictures

Do your two windows show different paths in the Address Bar? If so, what are the two paths?

Mark

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Yes.
Jun 6, 2012 2:21AM PDT

The file path for the one in the start menu was C:\Documents and Settings\{AccountName}\My Pictures while the one within My Documents has the usual file path C:\Documents and Settings\{AccountName}\My Documents\My Pictures.

In the end I had no option but to take the plunge, spend hours cross referencing (as I could find no way to merge the two folders) ensuring they both had identical content before deleting the rogue folder from Documents and Settings. It reappeared in the Start menu but is presumably simply a shortcut now for the one within My Documents as the content seems to update accordingly.

I have no idea why this happened but as Kees_B said it was probably something that I did. Interestingly though, although I could find no mention of this on online forums, I do know my neighbour (with whom I had no email communication) had a similar problem on their laptop a couple of years ago. They moved away so I don't know how they resolved it.

Thank you for your reply and your offer of help. If it happens again I'll post the update here.

Regards,
S