How to manage a huge folder collection in two places

Question

I have a huge collection of movies (over 2,000) on my external hard drive, and since my girlfriend doesn't like those old movies, she would like to make distinguish between the old movies and those from the last 5 years.

At this moment, every movie has it's own folder containing a movie file and a .srt file. Consequently I have a very long list of movies.

What I would like to do is to make two directories in the root, organized:

1. by year
2. by alphabet

The 'by year' folder would contain folders like "2012", "2011", etc., and the alphabet folder would simply contain all the movie folders in a long list.

Maintaining both these folders is obviously a very hard thing to do, not to mention the extra space it will require to have every movie-folder duplicated.

Is there a way to do what I want without duplicating every movie folder?

Answer 1

Create your 2012 movie folder. Hold down the command key and left mouse click to select each movie folder that has a movie made in 2012. Once you have them all selected (with the command key down) hold down the alt key, and "move" the aliases that are created for all of the movie folders you selected into the 2012 folder. What this does is create a pointer to the original file/folder, it doesn't actually copy the folder and contents. It's just a representation and "points" to the location of the original folder. This way you won't waste space (it's like 1kb per alias).

Do this for each of the year folders, and each of the alphabet folders. Seems like an easy way not to waste space.