How to change the default ‘Save’ location of Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer(WLW) is my favorite offline blogging tool provided by Microsoft corporation. It can be installed along with the Windows Live Essentials manually on your computer if you don’t have it yet.

It gives you the feel of writing a blog post in the view format on the webpage. We can even half write the blog posts and save on our computer for later editing.

By default, WLW saves the blog posts in the form of drafts and recent posts separately in the C:\Users\<Your Username>\Documents\My Weblog Posts directory. There is no option to change the save location unfortunately. So, any drafts that you had saved in the same directory where the operating system is installed would be gone if anything goes wrong with your OS.

As we cannot stop the operating system go wrong in one time or another, it is always better to save the files in another partition(s). Though there is no path changing option for WLW, we can change its default saving path by tweaking windows registry.

Performing the tweak

Hoping that you are using Windows 7 or later version(s) of operating system,

1. Press Win+R and type regedit to open windows registry.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > Windows Live.
3. Right-Click on Writer folder > New and Select String Value.
4. Rename it to PostsDirectory and then double-click on it to enter the value.
5. Copy-paste or type in the directory where you wanted to save the blog posts by default. For e.g., D:\

Note: Your blog posts will be saved in a folder named My Weblog Posts which would be created by default as a sub directory after giving the directory path in the Value field of PostsDirectory string.

So, finally your blog posts will be saved in the following directory(ies),
D:\My Weblog Posts\ – main directory.
D:\My Weblog Posts\Drafts – where your drafts are stored.
D:\My Weblog Posts\Recent Posts – Recently published posts or recently loaded-from-blog-blog posts will be saved.

Hope it solved the problem simply. Don’t forget to share if it worked for you or not!