Reading a PC Magazine article discussing Windows 7 Libraries has caused me to think again about previous thoughts on file management issues in Windows operating systems. A library functions along the lines of logically grouping similar file types together.
This isn’t a massively different way of thinking thatn what we’ve seen before in both Windows XP and Windows Vista with the My Music and My Pictures folders. The different way of looking at this file relationship though is that when you would open your My Music and My Pictures folders you were opening a single folder and looking at a group of files that were more than likely put there be the user.
The new functionality of libraries is that these groups of files exist only at the time they’re really used. When you open a library of files you’re seeing all the files of that type , regardless of where the file is physically located on the drive.
Obviously a better way to organize files is to make it almost mindless for the end-user. In addition there are times when you don’t want to put all of your similar files in the same place on your hard drive. You want to keep files together that are related to each other for a number of other reasons besides the type of file it is.