windows explorer shows different contents

Hi hikergene and welcome to Seven Forums. It would be helpful if you could upload some screenshots showing the problem.

Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums

Hello Gene, and welcome to Seven Forums. :)

Libraries let you access and arrange items from one or more folders quickly without moving them from their original location. Libraries themselves don't store your files or folders. Instead, they point to different locations on a hard disk or external drive attached to your computer. This gives you easy access to a category of files no matter where they are stored.


A library has more than one included folders that display in them by default.

For example, in your "Pictures" library, it has the the C:\Users\(user-name)\My Pictures and C:\Users\Public\Public Pictures folders included by default.

This is why when you open your C:\Users\(user-name)\My Pictures folder, that's all you see and not anything that was in the C:\Users\Public\Public Pictures folder. Only in the library would you see the files from both locations at once.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

That doesn't look like a standard Win 7 setup for MyPictures. It looks like somehow you have a MyPictures folder in your MyDocuments and a separate MyPictures folder. Most strange. The standard setup would be to only have the separate MyPictures.

Well, those are two different locations is why they do not have the same contents.

C:\Users\Gene\My Documents\My Pictures

VS

C:\Users\Gene\My Pictures

Did you try and move your user folders to different locations?

Backup the contents in these folders to be safe, then try OPTION TWO in the tutorial below to restore the default location of your My Pictures folder.

User Folders - Restore Default Location

You are welcome hikergene. Maybe a program you have installed created the one in MyDocuments. I get all sorts of strange folders created in MyDocuments by installed programs.