I like to keep resources for current projects organized in specific folders on my hard drive, but for projects in which I’m collaborating it makes a lot more sense to keep them on the server, where everyone working on the project can pool their resources.
Creating an alias to something mounted on an AFP shared, however, won’t work that well. It’ll work from within the Finder, but if you use some other application that is setup to automatically pull up the project folder (like, for example, Transmit) it will just error out.
This is a perfect job for a symlink – a Unix alias, essentially. They don’t have quite the flexibility that Apples aliases do, but they have their own set of tricks that are really useful, one of which is behaving much more like the file it is pointing to rather than just a traffic redirection tool.
As such, it was just what the doctor ordered for this. If you fire up the terminal and change to the directory you want to create the symlink in like thus:
cd ~/Documents/Projects
( This is assuming some familiarity with the terminal. If you have none, consult this excellent guide.)
Once there, type:
ln -s /Volumes/MyMountedNetworkShare/FolderIwouldLikeaSymLinkOf
Zap, a symlink that will dupe persnickity applications. Now, when I fire up Transmit, it automatically switches to the appropriate folder for all my local files, I get to keep my original folder organization, and everyone who works with me gets access to the files as well.