How to merge many image directories

It could be used to not only for images but for random files too I believe.

Let’s say that I have 3 directories
1, 2, 3
In every directory there are about 100 pictures

I would like to create another directory. Let’s call it Pictures and without copying all pictures I would like to have access to 300 pictures from directories 1, 2, 3.

I’ve been thinking about symlink
ln -s ~/1/* ~/Pictures
ln -s ~/2/* ~/Pictures
ln -s ~/3/* ~/Pictures

It works until I rename or delete file from 1 or 2 or 3
I would like to have an automatic update in Pictures directories. (adding new files to 1, 2, 3 included)

Is that possible?

That won’t be straightforward.

An easy way to make all files from a folder being accessible from a new other is to create the folder as a symlink to the first one. The issue here is that a symlink can only point to a single folder, not 3 as you intend to do.

If you intend to have multiple sources and a single target, you’ll need to work directly on the files.
At low level, you could create a script that look for new files in the sources, and create symlinks to them in the target; and look for broken symlinks in the target in order to delete them. Then make it run automatically through cron.

At a higher level, there may already be image viewers/organizers doing that kind of job. In this case, you’ll just need to let one do the work.

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