Put all your digital pictures in
your Pictures folder, for example, and that??™s where most photo applications
will prompt you to open and save your files. And as explained in the previous
section, Windows Explorer will be more likely to display your pictures
as thumbnails if they??™re in the Pictures folder (or a subfolder thereof). But
what if you don??™t want to put your pictures there?
Since years of digital photos can take up gobs of hard disk space, many people
have started storing their pictures (as well as their music) on second hard
disks, and it can be a pain to have to manually switch to the new location
each time you need to open or save a file.
The solution is to tell Windows where your Pictures folder ought to be, a
task that requires a quick Registry modification:
1. Open the Registry Editor (described in Chapter 3).
2. Expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\
Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders.
Also in the Explorer branch of the Registry is the Shell
Folders key. According to Microsoft, the key is no longer
used in Vista, although you may want to update it as well for
good measure. (You never know which applications may still
be reading from it.)
3. Double-click the My Pictures value in the right pane, and type (or paste)
the full path of the folder you want to use (e.g., d:\Photos). (The default
here is %USERPROFILE%\Pictures, which is an expandable string value that
points to the Pictures subfolder of your personal profile folder.
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