How can I create a folder whose contents are the results of a path with wildcards or similar expressions?

I have a relatively well organized directory structure containing all of my photos and videos and related files. This structure exists on several drives. These drives are also mapped as network drives so I can access them on various machines.

I wish to create a folder on one or more of my machines which will give me the ability to access a subset of the documents on these various drives as though they were all in one location.

Some concrete examples of the files I'm looking to round up and where they can be found:

X:\2021-10-29 camping\canon g16\developed\IMG_1231.jpg

X:\2021-09-29 camping\developed\IMG_1232.jpg

Z:\2020-11-29 camping\canon g16\developed\IMG_1233.jpg

W:\2021-10-29 skiing\saturday\canon g16\developed\IMG_1234.jpg

The result folder would contain each of files above, without subfolders. I can imagine a regular expression which might match such files or a search algorithm in some programming language which could find these files but I have no idea how to convince Windows that a folder with these files exists. It seems like it should be possible using links or symlinks or some other trickery. Any ideas? I also wish to eventually setup some arrangement where all of my physical storage drives are presented as one logical drive - ideally with the option of adding more physical devices over time. So if that's a helpful first step in achieving my goals I'd entertain doing that first.

I have a script which creates hardlinks, which make a single file visible in multiple directories. (It was developed on Linux, and I was surprised it works on Windows).

You can install Cygwin and use its ln command : ln source_file destination. If you prefer Python to develop your script, you can use :

import os

os.link(source, destination)

I guess that most languages can do the same.

With Cygwin, you can type :

find source -type f | xargs -I "{}" ln "{}" destination_directory

This will create a new link of all your files in a single directory. (Beware, C:\ is named /cygdrive/c in Cygwin)