Including a Network Folder in Library | Windows 7

Network Folders cannot be included in Library in Windows 7 and Windows 8. You will get an error message saying “This network locaion can’t be included because it is not indexed”.

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Folders must be indexed first in order to be added to a library, and network drives cannot be indexed unless they are synchronized (downloaded on local computer).

You can either make the network folder “Available when Offline” which means downloading all the content of that network drive, and keep it synchronized.

I don’t like that idea because I don’t want to keep the folder contents on your PC, due to privacy and storage reasons, although searching, sorting, and filtering in the whole library is a lot faster this way.

Anyway, here is how I do it.

1. Create a new folder (e.g. c:documents) in your C drive
2. Include this folder (e.g. c:documents) to a library.
3. Delete this folder (e.g. c:documents), but DO NOT remove it from the library.
4. Open CMD with administrator privilege.
5. Use mklink in command prompt to make a symbolic link. Name the link the same as the folder you created above. i.e mklink /d “LINK” “TARGET”
6. mklink /d “c:documents” “\ServerNetwork Folder”

Done.