I have a directory of pictures. Then I have a set of subdirectories, each of which has simlinks to select pictures in the original directory--kind of a quick-and-dirty way to create albums. It has the advantage that a single picture can be in multiple albums, without having to expend the storage space necessary to actually copy the picture into each album.

Okay, so now I want to create a portable CD version of the album set--portable meaning I can give copies to my family and they can view it on their Windows computers *almost* as easily as I can view it on Linux. All the pictures are on the CD and the symlinks are relative and therefore internal to the CD filesystem.

The problem is that the simlinks just show up as zero length files in Windows (which simlinks are, of course), and Windows doesn't seem to know to follow them.

Is there any Windows-hack equivalent of simlinks that can be applied by mkisofs, or is my only option to create a bunch of .lnk files in my album directories?

Is there a better way to achieve what I want? (A portable CD-based set of photo albums, where a single photo might be in multiple albums without the storage overhead of multiple copies of the photo.)

Thanks for any help!

im not sure that what you want to do is feasable. The easiest way is, since it's going on CD-ROM permently (and if it will fit), open up K3B, pop in the directory, and set it to follow SymLinks. That way it'll actually burn the real file in place of the symlink. If there's enough space, that is.

But I guess this is not what you want. My suggestion is to make a real photo-album... out of HTML or something, then just <img src=""> in all of the pictures into the appropriate sections.

Or go online and get a free photo-organization website or something...

There's several options, but I'm not sure that any of these are what you want. Sorry I can't help any more than this.

That's just what I had hit upon. Either way, the organization is static, so rather than browsing directories with a file manager, I'll just create a hierarchy of static html pages to browse with a web browser.

Actually, I'm modifying a package that creates the web pages automatically, along with thumbnails, using the existing directory structure (webimage is the name of the package). I'm adding to it to automatically detect symbolic links, and put the symlink target in the <img> tag.

So, the end result is that I'll have both structures.

Thanks for the suggestion!

By the way, dereferencing the links wasn't going to work. I have over 2G of pics, many of which would have been copied multiple times to different albums. I would have quickly overfilled the DVD on which I'm going to distribute the album. And for the same reason (the shear number of pictures) a DVD slideshow wan't really practicable either.

glad I could help!