Our friend Deb Shinder from GFI / Vipre securities, has an excellent piece on Windows 7 Libraries, a very handy little tool/interface in Windows 7. Below is her article in full.
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Deb’s Deep Dive
Digging into How Windows 7 Libraries Work
If you’ve used Windows 7, you’ve almost certainly encountered the new Libraries feature – although if you used Windows Media Center in XP and Vista, the concept of libraries shouldn’t be new to you. Libraries seem to be another of those features that you either love or hate, much like the Ribbon interface in the latest versions of Office. Some folks embrace it immediately, recognizing the big advantages of having the ability to quickly access distributed content from one central location in Explorer. Others write to me, pleading for a way to “turn off” the libraries features and make Explorer “normal” again.
If you like the libraries idea – or at least are curious to learn more before making a decision, this article explains the basics of how you use the libraries. What I want to talk about in this “deep dive” is where the libraries came from and what’s going on “under the hood” with these very special types of folders – and then I’ll provide a link telling you how to get rid of them if you still don’t like them.
Here’s the problem that Microsoft was trying to solve with libraries: Even though XP and Vista had those nice little default folders called My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, etc. that were part of each user’s profile, many Windows users didn’t store all their files of specific types there. Maybe it was because the partition wasn’t big enough, maybe it was because they preferred to put their data on external drives that were easy to transfer to another machine, or maybe they just weren’t paying attention when they saved the files. For whatever reasons, user data ended up being spread over different folders all over the computer or even on other computers on the network. Then when they wanted to find those files, they sometimes had to go on a long scavenger hunt.
Libraries let you continue to store your files in different folders, and still “see” them all in one place: the library. You define which folders (local and remote) will be included in the library. Each library itself contains two physical file locations. One is the default folder such as My Documents or My Pictures that is automatically included in the library. The other is the Public folder for that file category. Note that a file type refers to the particular format indicated by the extension, such as a .jpg file. The file category refers to the kind of file, such as a graphics file, which could be one of many types (.jpg, .gif, .pang, etc.).
The default folders (My Documents, etc.) in Vista were called “known folders” and they differed under the hood from these folders in XP. They are part of the user storage profile. Windows 7 still has these known folders; each is now part of the library of the same file category. A library looks like a folder to the user, but files aren’t actually stored in the library itself; they’re physically stored in the folders that belong to that library. The library monitors those folders so that when you add something to one of the folders, it’s automatically also added to the library. Each library has a default save location, which is a real folder to which a file is saved if the user saves it to that library. You can change the default save location for a library to any folder that belongs to that library. The library itself is stored in Windows as an .xml file with the file extension “.library-ms” in the AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries folder.
Libraries can make users’ lives easier by giving you easy access to your files, no matter where they’re really located. However, they can also be confusing if you don’t know how they work, and they can add a layer of complexity for developers whose applications need to access those files.
For those of you who would prefer not to deal with the libraries at all, here’s an article that tells you how to disable and remove libraries from Windows Explorer.
Deb Shinder, Contributing Editor
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