Let me give you an example of the rather odd functionality I'm after. Imagine you have your local HDD, an external HDD, and a usb stick, all containing a folder called "MediumMedley". When all these storage mediums are connected, you want to query all these locations and display a merger of the results within one location, to have a proper overview.
Can anyone think of any ways to achieve something akin to this?
Bonus points if the end result is a windows explorer window (I want full explorer functionality, ie thumbnails, context menus etc).
One approach I tried was to do a custom search (looking at this SU question: How to search in multiple folders in Windows 7? ), which works, but as far as I can tell (doing an empty * search) you can only get windows search to show a flattened hierarchy of the queried folders – not very helpful.
I could easily write a .net app myself to do exactly this, but I won't be able to easily build a pretty client with context menus, thumbnails etc…
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PS: I need these folders each in their own storage medium, as exemplified, for reasons. Don't tell me that I should just use dropbox. Unless you know a trick that solves what I ask.
Best Answer
If you're using Windows, you can take advantage of Libraries. Just create a new Library and add the "MediumeMedley" folders from each drive to it. You can then leverage the Windows Search feature in the top right of Windows Explorer as well as take advantage of all native Explorer functionality.
Here I've created a "Foo Folders" Library and added "Foo" folders from 2 different drives.