I found a peculiarity that I am hoping to understand in order to improve my understanding of Unraid and WinXP.

 

Picasa can see files when:

An Unraid share is mounted as a local drive (e.g. mount \\tower\pictures onto "P:").

 

Picasa does not see files when:

A network shortcut is specified (e.g. "My Documents/Shortcut to pictures on Media Server (Tower)" )

 

Does Windows treat network paths differently from lettered drive (e.g. "P:") paths?

Short cuts are treated differently by different programs. Some know how to handle them and some do not. Likely you're experiencing a program which doesn't know how to handle them.

 

Have you tried using NTFS symlinks? Under Windows 7, I use symlinks to my network shares and the programs I use are able to follow them.

You mean symbolic links (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363878.aspx)?

 

No I have not. Do you put this into a batch or do you use some other software? For example, I found these:

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfslinkext/

http://www.pearlmagik.com/winbolic/

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx edit: does not work for network drives

Symlinks on NTFS only have to be created once. They are persistent. I created them once from an administrator level command prompt with "mklink". [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link ]

 

eg:

 

c:

mkdir c:\Mount

cd c:\Mount

mklink /D TV \\Reaver\Media\TV

 

Apparently, Symbolic Links is only in Windows Vista/7. Windows XP does not have Symbolic Links - it only has Junctions, which does not permit network drives.

 

So there is no real solution to this other than to take a network drive and mount it to a letter drive, such as "P:". (If desired, one could then create a junction from "My Documents" to "P:".)

What if you mount it not as a drive letter, but as a directory? I've done that in the past to cut down on drive letter insanity. I think WinXP can do that atleast. It's been a long time since I've used it so I don't recall all of XP's massive limitations.