Answer by trojanfoe for Visual Studio: How to "Copy to Output Directory" without copying the folder structure?

To add my hat into the ring here, if you want to include a whole directory of content and you don't want to track each individual file in Visual Studio, then you can add this in your project file (for me this is a .vcxproj file of a UWP C++ project):

<ItemGroup><Content Include="Content\**"><CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory></Content></ItemGroup>

Note that the Content directory must be in the same directory as the project file in order to preserve the directory structure.