Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Although take heed of Steve's comment, if duplicates exist you have to ask yourself why...perhaps if we are talking on a fileserver it is because someone wanted a local copy they can edit without impacting everyone else...start replacing these for hard links and you are going to upset people.
Steve's comment was very relevant, I did know that but had largely forgotten it so part of my desire for using it is shot to pieces!
That said, it's not uncommon around these parts for someone to duplicate a website to do work on it, where a large volume of product images are included that are not edited and that directory can represent 90+% of the total size of the copy. There are better alternatives to doing the copy of-course, and I think maybe I should look at that before I start linking copies of images.