I have multiple copies of all my music and photos duplicated in all related program files, plus in my documents, which is seen in several locations on the internal hard drive & my external HD.
Is that necessary so each individual program can access the file or can music & photo files be placed in one folder & all related players and viewers may access the same file from one location on the hard drives? Seems like too much storage for the same file.
No it is not necessary, yes media files need only exist in one place and they can be accessed by all programs. You can safely delete all duplicates and just keep one copy.
That said, are you sure you actually have multiple copies? What do you mean by "duplicated in all related program files", are you sure you can see them in different locations on the internal drive? My Documents is only a single place, it may be linked to from various other folders but it is one entity, not many. You don't have multiple "My Documents" folders.
I think Larry is saying that when he installs applications, some offer the "search for content" option, and then decide to copy the files it finds into its own program folder. I can't remember which apps do this, but I've had it happen to me before.
My suggestion is that you do one of the following two things:
Look in the applications' Preferences menu (or similar), and just point its data folder to the original in My Documents that has all of the content.
If the application doesn't have its data folder exposes as a setting, then go into your filesystem, delete the folder, and then replace it with a symbolic link that points to your folder in My Documents.
Assuming that you really meant the Windows My Documents folder when you said "my documents" in your question, you can do it with mklink /d.
