I’ve got a few groups in DTse that map to folders on my hard drive (outside of the normal DT support folder). These are for things like source code snippets, specification PDFs, etc… which are all organized for use by other applications in addition to DTse.
It would be great if I could set DTse to synchronize its view of a group to the folder on the disk. Something like XCode’s “Create Folder References for Folders” option vs. “Create Group for Folders” - the folder reference maps directly to the folder on disk, while the group option creates a symbolic internal group that is separated from the folder itself. This would have the added benefit of not needing to synchronize to folders at all - the DTse groups would actually be folders somewhere out on the filesystem, so any changes made there would automatically be reflected in DTse (and vice versa).
Yep, there are times I’d prefer “Link To” with a directory target to be a link to that directory instead of the current behavior of creating a new group with each item being a link to individual files. But how would the items be represented in such a “linked group”?
Related question/comments:
I normally keep the “Copy files into database” preference set and temporarily change that to “Don’t copy”, then Import an image-containing directory so thumbnails will be generated. When a Link To target is a directory of images is there any way for thumbnails to be generated in DT?
Link To and Import groups for the same directory basically look the same (list of link items), except that items in the Link To group have generic icons and those in the Import group have thumbnails. There’s a confusing overlap of functionality depending on the Copy Files preference. Could be that I’d prefer if Import always implied “Copy files into database”, but I have to think more about it and other combinations.
Now I’m wondering if the future DT “Synchronize” will be like Import, Link To, or something else…
This has been modified in version 1.8.1 - linking to images just creates referenced (“Don’t copy”) images but still thumbnails, see also, classify etc. are available.
Therefore you can set the preference to "Copy into database" for example and use the command-option modifiers while dragging or the "Link To" command to create images that are not copied. No more need to switch the preferences.
In addition, another feature of version 2.0 will be "folder references".