Desktop Media: get automatic desktop shortcuts when you plug in your USB drive or other media
Desktop Media is a free program that can display shortcuts on the desktop to USB drives, CDs/DVDs and other media when you plug them in, and automatically removes these shortcuts when you unplug. It can also alternately create so-called “hard links” to your media instead of shortcuts.
[Update Jul 24, 2008] This program has gone through several changes as to warrant an updated review and a “Freewaregenius Pick” award!
This program is similar to the afore-mentioned “Desk Drive” in that it aims to provide the user with automatic shortcuts to their USB and other drives that appear and disappear from the desktop as 
the user plugs their media in and out. Shortly after posting the review for “Desk Drive” I received the following email from the author of this program, which pretty much sums it all: “I just saw your post on the Desk Drive application yesterday, and I thought it was a great idea ….. Unfortunately, I usually prefer not to install .NET apps, so I decided to write my own version of this… It also has a feature that Desk Drive does not, which is support for Symbolic Links via the Junction utility from SysInternals… Please let me know if you run into any bugs and I will be glad to fix them. This was a great idea for an application and I wanted to create an app with a small footprint to make it a little more appealing.” This about sums it all up. Here are more notes on “Desktop Media”:
- Supported media: optionally supports any or all of: removable drives, fixed drives, network/remote drives, CD/DVD drives and RAM disks. Also allows the exclusion of specific drive letters that you might want to opt out of displaying desktop shortcuts.
Hard links: you can opt for hard links rather than shortcuts. The difference is that while shortcuts point to the drive icon, hard links are equivalent to them (i.e. it is just like having a drive icon on your desktop). This might be handy for some file operations that might not work with shortcuts very well. Note (a) the program will automatically prompt the installation of the included Sysinternals “Junction” utility if you choose hard links, (b) to learn more about hard links see this related post, and (c) a suggested use for hard links: if you add your desktop as a toolbar on your taskbar (see screenshot)you can browse the media right from your taskbar.- Save icon position: provides the option to remember the placement of the icon(s) on the desktop, in order to display them in the same locations in the future.
- User interface: lives in the system tray, but provides the option to hide that icon (whereby the program dialog can be accessed again from the start menu).
- Note on removable media: e.g. USB drives and CD/DVD drives, Desktop Media, to quote the developer’s site, “will only add the drive to your desktop if it is present … if you have a CD/DVD drive, but no
disc is present, you won’t see the icon on your desktop”. - Maximize windows: the option to open drives as maximized windows, (i.e. when you click on the drive icon, the window will appear maximized on your entire screen).
- Memory use: approx. 4 megs. (Compared to Desk Drive, whose memory use is not 100% clear because of .NET – anywhere between 2 to 18 megs).
The verdict: a very nice program that adds a very nice functionality to Windows. I prefer this to “Desk Drive” because it does not require .NET and because of its clear (and generally low) memory usage, as well as its support for hard links as well as shortcuts.
[Thanks Ian Perez for this wonderful app!]
Version Tested: 1.7
Compatibility: Windows XP; Vista.
Go to the program home page to download the latest version (approx 354K).
Seems to work ok on Vista Business 32bit
[...] One guy has gone so far as to write a his own version of Desk Drive because he doesn’t like to install .NET applications on his computer. Why someone would care about such a thing is beyond my understanding. Wonder if he has Java installed? What ever… In the interest of full disclosure you can read more about it here. [...]
I have updated this app to version 1.2. Here are the changes:
* Some bug fixes
* Now works with fast-user switching
* Option to show/hide the tray icon
Please note that if you hide the tray icon, simply run the app again to open up the options dialog.
Please report any bugs to this post.
http://www.ianandmonica.com/desktop-media-setup-1.2.zip
This works perfectly on vista home premium 32 bit.
When running it on my machine it continuously tries to read from the floppy drive.
(WinXP SP2)
Darren:
I have updated the app to version 1.3, which fixes the problem you are having with your floppy drive.
Let me know if you run into any other problems.
http://www.ianandmonica.com/desktop-media-setup-1.3.zip
I’ve updated my app to 1.4, with the following changes:
* fixed a bug that I introduced in 1.3 (d’oh)
* fixed another bug that I found along the way
http://www.ianandmonica.com/desktop-media-setup-1.4.zip
it would be nice if it could:
*remember the position of the icon. My desktop is cluttered, and i like the USB drive icon to appear ALWAYS on the right side of the screen.
Excellent, another utility to make my Windows machine at work emulate what Mac OSX does at home.
It would be nice if it also had a way to safely stop attached USB devices. The Windows dialog to do this doesn’t make it easy to tell which device will be disconnected if there are multiples of the same type connected. A few weeks ago I went hunting for a freeware app to give friendly names to the USB devices. Nothing good was found. It’s risky to remove external storage without stopping it because of delayed writes.
@ FredThompson:
Try ‘USB Disk Ejector’ – “Quickly eject USB drives and devices with USB Disk Ejector”, reviewed here at FreewareGenius.com!
http://www.freewaregenius.com/2008/01/03/quickly-eject-usb-drives-and-devices-with-usb-disk-ejector/
It goes on all my Thumb Drives & Computers, and works Great!
@ Samer – you have excellent readers – Nicely done program!
It only recognized my external drives once and won’t see them again, 250G WD USB-powered drive and one of those IDE/SATA adapters.
@CT – Whoa! That’s a nice app. Wonder how I missed the review. Thanks for the link.
OK, I was wrong. External drives are “fixed” so they are detected when those are enabled. However, there needs to be a way to set drives to ignore or it needs to discriminate better on drive types and only recognize USB drives. It’s displaying links to internal SATA drives. Memory usage is 1/5 that of DeskDrive. Nice.
@ FredThompson:
One not-so-well-known feature of the Windows built-in Safely Remove Hardware tray icon is that you can single left-click on it to bring up a menu that gives much more information about USB devices, such as their assigned drive letters.
@ FredThompson:
Or try USB Safely Remove (http://www.safelyremove.com/index.html). IMHO, perfect for my needs.
Does this work in windows vista? ability to exclude a drive, usb drive for people who do not want to show shortcut icon for windows vista readyboost or their permanent external drive and a option to show desktop when a usb drive or media is inserted. Will this be the last version?
Hi all,
I have updated my app to 1.5. Here are the changes:
* Option to save the desktop icon positions
* Option to ignore drives
* Fixed a bug where the desktop path was not being detected correctly
http://www.ianandmonica.com/desktop-media-setup-1.5.zip
Let me know if anyone runs into any problems.
Icons for C (internal SATA) are still popping up, even though they are in the ignore category. Nice auto-detect you have. It found my DVD drive. There must be something odd with SATA C:.
@ Fred Thompson:
Are you sure that you selected the C drive in the ignore list? It shows all drives on the list, not just the ignored ones. You have to click on the drive to ignore it.
No, that wasn’t obvious to me. I thought the list was those drives which will be ignored because it includes C: but not the internal DVD or virtual DVD drives.
Desktop Media – excellent program! (I disdain .NET apps). Couple suggestions. With soft links, the shortcuts are predefined to open with the window Maximized – I prefer the default method (Normal). With Hard Links, could you pull up the drive’s icon rather than have a blank folder? (that could be a bit more difficult and really isn’t necessary but would be nice).
I currently use the hard links due to that the window opens in a Normal state.
Great Job!
Possibly shouldn’t the shortcuts be removed if the program is terminated? (just a thought)
Sorry – I see that the shortcuts are removed upon program termination – for some reason it didn’t occur on the first time but subsequent testing revealed that is does perform this task.
Suggestion:
*make a right click entry “Safely Remove USB”, just like in Linux.
*hard links should have a ‘drive’ icon rather than a regular folder icon.
*make the links remember the new name after i rename it.
save icon positions doesn’t work
@ GIn:
What version of windows are you running?
Also, are you running as an administrator or a limited user? I have found that this feature does not work in limited user mode, because it has to hook into the explorer process to get/set the icon positions, which is not allowed as a limited user.
using XP SP3 and using administrator.
How about changing the web download address so we can see the programs to pick the latest. I downloaded 3 versions before I found the highest as I didn’t realize you were updating so fast. Nice program!
Out of curiosity, what language did you write this application in? Did you use Delphi, or C/C++?
Regards
@ Mick:
I wrote the app in C (some C++ for data structures) using the Win32 API.
I really like this one. Simple, small, does what it’s supposed to do. It’s ended complaints from computer UNsaavy relatives about how to get to an external drive.
Will there be a “real” home page? Will there be a way to set normal window instead of maximized?
@ Fred Thompson:
I’ve been meaning to implement the feature to show the windows as normal instead of maximized, but I’ve been pretty busy at home and at work. I’ll try to get to it this week.
I also want to start up a small page to show the most current version of the app and such, but again, I don’t have a lot of free time right now. Maybe sometime this month.
I am pleased with the software. But I think there should be a disclaimer for choosing hard links in the options panel.
I have chosen that while experimenting with version 1.5. What happened is that the local drive c has been permanently placed on the desktop. No matter if i hit ignore now. I need to remove the hard linked c local disk. there is no way i know how to do that now.
I answered my own problem.
It was caused by the icon appearance that i changd it. Using “folderico” made it unrecognized by “desktop media”
[...] Desktop Media: Shortcuts to your hardware devices only while they are plugged in [...]
I’ve been looking for an app like this for a long, long time. Please continue to develop it, it’s enormously promising.
Just two things to mention in the current version:
-Saving icon positions doesn’t seem to work
-It would be great to have a “safely remove” option added to the shortcut context menu
Keep up the great work!
Perhaps he could do the disk ejection by launching USB Disk Ejector.
Great little app, just the way I like’em — with the plus of no sluggish DotNet requirement. M$ should really have included this funciotnality in their OS by now — maybe they can pack Desktop Media as a Windows Update ;D. Thanks for your great work, Ian.
Just a note: in the shortcut created for my usb drive, the ‘Start in:’ field is being filled with a string with this structure:
“[%HOMEDRIVE%]:\Documents and Settings\[%USER%]\Desktop\[USBDRIVELABEL].lnk”
Clearly, the last slash and whatever comes after can be considered a bug or am I mistaken?
seem to work well with windows XP
cool app
It would be nice if there was an option to create a Windows taskbar or if the icons could go to a folder of my choosing instead of just to the desktop. Thanks.
Hope to see an update soon (at least have the shortcut window set as ‘normal’).
any news? icon position doesn’t work
The saving the position of soft links doesn’t seem to work in Vista Ultimate
Great App tho!
Hi all,
I have updated my app to 1.6. Here are the changes:
* Fixed some bugs
* Save Icon Positions should work now
* Added option to show shortcuts as maximized (default is normal)
I also created a small page that will host the current version of the app.
http://www.funding4cesar.com/desktopmedia
Let me know if anyone runs into any problems.
Currently user have to choose the startup setting during the installation. Can you add the startup setting in the options.
Does this work in Vista with standard account(limited account/non Administrator)
Hi Jarret,
It should work fine in Vista with a non-admin account, but the Save Icon Positions feature won’t work.
Thanks a lot for updating this, Ian, the program is amazing now.
Hi all,
I think I have found an issue with the latest version of Desktop Media (1.6). I am seeing corruption of the explorer.exe process memory (which my app hooks into to save/load the icon positions). I would advise against using the Save Icon Positions feature until I have found a fix for it.
I apologize if this has caused any inconvenience.
Hi all,
I have fixed the memory leak that Desktop Media 1.6 was causing in explorer when using the Save Icon Positions feature. Please go to the program’s page to download the latest version.
http://www.funding4cesar.com/desktopmedia