I regularly present to audiences using PowerPoint. I frequently interleave canned demonstrations (videos) throughout my presentations. I like to keep directories for each session with the PowerPoint documents and videos I showed that day’s audience. But I dislike the idea of spreading copies of the same file around my hard drive when I use the same content many times.
OSX supports aliases, which are small files that link to the original documents. But there are a lot of quirky things about aliases. For instance, my Mac has no ability to replace the alias with the original file. Alias copies always produce another alias. This means when someone requests all my content on a USB, it is not possible to group select and copy. For each file I have to “show original file” and then copy that file. This is a real pain if there are many files.
After I requested help on a Mac forum someone referred me to AliasHerder. This simple tool will convert aliases to the original file. So, I can now copy an entire directory of links to a USB and quickly replace the aliases with the originals. This is done with three simple steps:
- Select all files and aliases I wish to copy.
- Drop the files and aliases to their target destination.
- Drag the target folder to the AliasHerder icon on my dock.
The internet is a wonderful place that people in need of miniature tools to ease their troubles can find help within hours. I happily donated this afternoon $4USD to AliasHerder’s author.