How do you stop kids saving tons of jpgs?

[woody]

Why oh why do they do it? Ok so they have an interest. Cars. An Xbox game. Fluffy bunnies. So they google it, find a site with loads of highres jpgs, then save them into their user folder.

 

So far, I have found quotas to be inflexible and difficult to get the balance between those who need extra space and those who don't.

 

Each year, I delete all the pics and then if any come back to me saying they need a particular image for work, I restore it if I still have it on backup. But it doesn't take two minutes for them to fill up their 'My Pictures' folder with unnecessary images again. How do you sort this problem out?

[ninjabeaver]

God yes. I need that one as well. Nightmare.

[plexer]

A policy that unless the pictures are for coursework that they can prove then they delete them on pain of being banned if they dont?

 

Ben

[ChrisH]

I wish it was jpegs seems to be bitmaps in my case. I would probably redirect my pictures (if its possible) and use the R2 file screen to stop them saving in their main folder. Then impose a size limit on the redirected my pictures. I plan to do something similar for my music.

[woody]

I wish it was jpegs seems to be bitmaps in my case. I would probably redirect my pictures (if its possible) and use the R2 file screen to stop them saving in their main folder. Then impose a size limit on the redirected my pictures. I plan to do something similar for my music.

 

As you say, redirect 'my pictures' (if possible) but how would you do this. It's not one of the folders available for redirection in group policy.

[ChrisH]

In that case I would set up a seperate mapped drive for them.

[plexer]

It's not available from the redirection GPO but you can do it according to M$

My Pictures The default location for pictures and images in Windows 2000. Typically, My Pictures is contained in the My Documents folder. By default, if My Documents is redirected, My Pictures is also redirected. Alternatively, My Pictures can be redirected independently of My Documents. However, it is recommended that you allow My Pictures to remain within My Documents, unless you need to separate these folders for a specific reason such as server scalability, for example.

 

Found a util to do it:

 

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/folderredirector.htm

 

The registry key where these are all set is:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders]

 

Presume you could create an ADM to allow this to be set via gpo.

 

Would allow you to do my pics, music, videos as well

 

These are the folders that will give you students huge my docs folders anyway.

 

Ben

[ChrisH]

Good find

[plexer]

There is also a setting for my pictures in the redirection of my documents but on my setup it's greyed out and I can't enable it.

 

you can redirect My Pictures by using a GPO. You have to

 

undo that My Pictures is a subfolder under My Documents, then a separate

 

policy shows for My Pictures (close the GPO and reopen it), then you can

 

direct it to wherever. Make sure the folder exist BEFORE doing the

 

policy.

 

Taken from a thread at:

 

http://www.mcse.ms/message1742530.html

 

Ben