How do I change location for the "standard" folders? (Images, Documents, Downloads etc)

Question

My desktop has an 240GB SSD that i use for the OS and a 2TB HDD which I use for extra space. In Windows (all versions), it is possible to use the HDD for "Images", "Documents", "Music" etc. How do I achieve this in 16.04?

Answer 1

You can change their standard location by changing the file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs which usually looks something like this:

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you're
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR="/yyy", where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
# 
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/desktop"
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/downloads"
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/templates"
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/share"
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/doc"
XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/music"
XDG_PICTURES_DIR="$HOME/pictures"
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="$HOME/videos"

Now lets say you have a second drive (assuming it is /dev/sdb1) and you have it auto-mounted over your fstab file to /media/external you would alter the links like this:

XDG_VIDEOS_DIR="/media/external/videos"