I mentioned recently that I need to organize my astrophotos, which are generally organized by date taken, scattered amidst thousands of other pictures. I really wanted a single folder of astrophotos without breaking their date context. Windows 7 and likely later has the equivalent of Unix symbolic links! Right click on a picture and Create Shortcut. This creates a shortcut to the picture in current folder, which you can then drag to another folder so all your astrophotos (or your quilting pictures or your silly cat pictures) appear in one place. Of course these are links to the original, not copies, so they take up very little space and if you click on a link and edit it, it changes the original photo, which can be good or bad, depending on your goal.
If you select multiple pictures, you can Create Shortcut on all at once. They will be scattered in filename order, which makes it harder to drag just the shorts, but sort by size and you can drag just the links (typically 11K in size),
Note: symbolic links to directories are not advised. I symbolically linked a directory, then deleted the link in my astrophotos directory and it deleted both link and original directory.
Found a few lost gems:
I think this can also be done with the Libraries, which for my purposes are normally more of a pain than a boon.
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