Windows desktop background slide shows work with folders of real images and folders containing softlinks to real images. Using softlinks is handy when the target images are not all in one place. I have a number of existing Opus collections pointing to groups of images spread across a variety of folders. I was hoping to find a quick way of creating softlinks from a collection using Opus commands. Something along the lines of...
Copy MAKELINK=softlink,location
..to point each link to the selected target using its location information.
Maybe a less messy solution: Create a Wallpaper library, add all your wallpaper folders to the library, then set Windows to use that library for its wallpaper.
That's what I've been doing since Windows 7 was released and it works great, without having to create hundreds of softlinks pointing all over the place.
My background image collections typically map to multiple folders organized into years and events (e.g. holiday albums) within those years. Opus Collections are a great way of mapping to selected images in disparate locations - neat, quick, simple, and effective. Too bad Windows doesn't support such a useful construct.
Anyway, it's no big deal as I can either copy images from various sources into a background/wallpaper folder, or manually create a batch of softlinks in a background/wallpaper folder. Softlinks save space, although in these days of cheap multi terabyte disks that is hardly an issue.
Can't you just add the parent folder(s) containing all the albums to a wallpaper library? Or would that pull in lots of other things you don't want?
You should be able to make a button that creates links from collection items using dopusrt /cmd, but I still think it's something best avoided unless there's no alternative.
Yes, "lots of other things I don't want" is what drove me to look for other ways and means. I usually want a subset of images from several folders.
I'm interested to know why you think softlinks are best avoided? In my case, once created they are static and the target containing folders are also static so there is no issue with breaking the links. There is always an alternative..... I was just hoping for a quick and dirty lazy man's solution.
I was just hoping for a quick and dirty lazy man's solution.