Windows 7: Can't save images (or files in general) to sub-folders

This is the closest I could find as far as a relevant forum section for this problem.



The sub-folders within my "My Pictures" folder won't let me save directly to them. For example, I would just save an image from the internet directly to a specific folder for organizational reasons, but it says "access denied". BUT when I try to save it to "My Pictures" it works just fine! And then I have to move it later to the folder I wanted it in originally.

I tried going to the main Pictures folder and un-checking the "Read Only" box (which was checked for some reason), but that didn't work (included all sub folders). I also tried to doing that directly to a folder I wanted to save to, no luck.

EDIT: I also seem to just not be able to do much of any basic things with the images inside of "My Pictures", including just a simple rotation! This seems like a real issue.

It depends - is this a clean install? Did you move the location of the My Pictures folder? Did these folders already exist previously under a different installation of Windows?

It sounds like you have a permissions issue going on here. Let me know about the answers to these questions and we can go forward from there.

Actually these are files copied over directly from a previous install of windows (from windows.old).

Would they keep the permissions from the previous install, possibly not seeing me the owner of the files (or by default as an administrator)?

I also fixed it, at least for now, by "taking ownership" of the files. I didn't think to do this before, but at least it worked.

In addition to taking ownership you may find that actually giving "full control permissions to these sub folders will prevent any "click to continue" prompts you may get.

This is I believe a side effect of the transfer from the old OS and the retention of existing permissions.

Due to the dual nature of users in Windows 7 due to the UAC it is quite common in these situations

Hi

They must have been moved, not copied.

Moving maintains the given user rights, copying makes the folder/files adopt rights from the parent folder.

This is solved very simply by MOVING them out of the pictures folder into a temporary folder, and then COPY them back into the pictures folder.

They will adopt the parent folder's (pictures) rights.

Good luck.

That is what I thought.

Every time I clean installed Windows 7 on my primary Seagate 500 GB HD the folders on the secondary 500 GB HD (where I moved my special folder locations to - Downloads, Contacts, Documents, etc) would need to be taken ownership again - b/c the CLSID associated with my user name would change on every clean install, even if the actual user name was the same every time....

Since it takes virtually no time to take ownership and set my permissions on all those folders on the secondary drive, I do it that way - but Squon is correct moving them away and copying them back would solve the problem as well.

It's just that moving 300+ GB of data (in my case) is infeasible.

The moving part wouldn't be the problem, because only the point of entry in the MFT is changed, (providing it's on the same partition). The occupied data size would stay the same.

The copying would have to take place in stages if there isn't enough space,
deleting the source files/folders every time that part is copied.


However, there is another reason I prefer the copy method.

If you move a lot of folders/files, there will be unknown and unused users left in the security settings,
and you would have to go through the whole tree to find them/ get rid of them.
Any problems there might have been with permissions from the previous install would remain in your new setup.

By copying you will have a nice fresh start.

One should also realize that if you have a system that's being used by other users with their own login account (non admin users), you would have to make sure you do the same trick for the "users and authenticated users", like you did for your own username, otherwise they could be excluded from folders they could enter before.

And then there is that slight chance of a power failure or disk failure during moving which could damage some of your crucial files.

Copying is safer.

Greetz

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My technique is slightly different I take ownership of the Drive or tree concerned, add user permissions as required to the top level and then use the advanced option to force propagate the permissions down the tree.

On really confused systems I have taken ownership and removed all users from the permissions, propagated this downwards to totally clean the tree then started with the correct users again.

Additional standard user and "everyone" permissions are added only after the tree is set for administrate access.

Yes, and that is the proper way to do it, but not within everybody's grasp.

The copy method is an just easy workaround for people who are not that familiar with NTFS security.

I use it because I'm to lazy, or busy or both.
After that I still have a lot of work restricting permissions so my daughter can access but not alter some folders and files.


I have a tip for advanced users that want to allow other members of the family to be admins but still want to make sure they can't take ownership and change permissions.

In group policies, take away the "take ownership" permission from the administrators, and only apply it to your own username.

You can do this with more special permissions.

greetz

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Umm, the moving part *would* be a problem - as I would need to move it to another drive, considering the existing drive only has 465 GB of space to begin with....

As for power failure - well, I have that covered:

APC SmartUPS 1500 - Nuff said.

As for going through all the rigmarole, well, I find manually going through the disk and editing owners and removing invalid users / owners is easier for me in the long run.

I prefer not to do the entire drive as there are always one or two folders that are better off left untouched - Recycler and System Information, to name a couple.

Understandable - it is the easier way to do it - I just prefer getting a bit more technical and explaining to user not only what is going on but why and how to fix it....

Of course, there has been a plethora of "Take ownership!" and "Check your permissions" answers when not are they always true. I remember one person claiming he was better off after taking ownership of the entire Program Files tree - even after I pointed out that he was essentially nullifying UAC....