Moving the Pictures Library

It is not unusual in this era of digital photographs to collect, over time, a large number of pictures. For this reason, you may want to move your Pictures library to a place other than the default location. This is a good idea, particularly if you are moving it to location with more space or to a faster drive.

Since the Pictures library is just a folder, you can easily move files into it and create subfolders within it. Unlike a regular folder (a library is special; it is considered a system folder) if you want to relocate it to another location you need to do so a little differently.

As an example, let's say you want to move your Pictures folder to "D:\Pictures." To do so, follow these steps:

1. Open either a Windows Explorer window (in Windows 7) or a File Explorer window (in Windows 8 or Windows 10). The easiest way to do this is to simply press Win+E.
2. Navigate to the folder C:\Users\<user>. (Replace <user> with your user name—the one you use to log into Windows.) You should see the My Pictures folder listed in the Explorer window.
3. Right-click the My Pictures folder and, from the resulting Context menu, choose Properties. Windows displays the My Pictures Properties dialog box.
4. Make sure the Location tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. Changing the location of the Pictures folder.

5. Enter the path to where you want the Pictures library located. In this case, you would enter D:\Pictures.
6. Click on OK. Windows prompts you to ensure you want to make the change and whether you want to move the existing picture files to the new location.
7. Click Yes (to signify you want to move the pictures).

Note that if you ever want to move the Pictures folder back to the default location of "C:\Users\<user>", you can go through the same procedure, but click the Restore Default button on the Location tab of the dialog box and everything will be moved back.

 This tip (12921) applies to Windows 7, 8, and 10.