How to optimise folders for their contents in Windows

Organising files and folders efficiently on the disk drive helps you to find them and to browse the drive contents more easily. Use these Windows features for optimising folder contents and bring order to chaos.

Folders on the disk drive are taken for granted and most people do not think about them. Most people create folders, put files in them and beyond thinking of a descriptive name, that is about it.

There is more to folders than you might think and it is possible to optimise them for their contents. This preselects the best way to display the files within a folder when using Explorer to view the disk contents.

Displaying a list of filenames is not always the best way to view files and if there are photos or other images then a better way for them to be displayed is using thumbnail images. Music and video files are different again and there are ways of displaying them that help when you are browsing the disk drive.

Choosing the right way to display a particular folder makes a big difference when you are trying to find files.

Customise Explorer’s file display

1. Open an Explorer window
2. Find a folder you want to optimise
3. Right click it and select Properties on the menu that appears. Folders on the desktop can be optimised in the same way - right click them and select Properties.
4. Select the Customise tab in the Files Properties window
5. Near the top is Optimise this folder for:

Select the option that is most appropriate to the type of files you will be storing in the folder. Let’s take a look at the different options and see how they change the file display in Explorer.

General items

Select this option if you intend to store a mixture of file types. No special view is selected and you can see the filename, date modified, type and size. Using the View tab in Explorer you can choose to display Details, icons, or a plain listing.

Documents

Use this for storing files like word processor documents, spreadsheet files, text files, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents and so on. It shows the name, date the file was modified, and the type. In fact, it is not much different to the General view.

Pictures

When Pictures is selected in the list, it automatically selects the thumbnail view for the folder contents. This works best for digital camera and phone photos, and artwork like bmp or png images. Other files sometimes have useful thumbnail images that enable you to distinguish between one file type and another, such as Excel and Word documents.

Music

Select Music for the folder contents and the files are displayed in a details view, but one that is specifically optimised for music files. You can see the track title, contributing artist and the album the tracks came from.

It is very different to the thumbnail view of a Pictures folder and it is easy to see the advantage of setting the right file type for the folder contents.

Videos

Set the folder contents to Videos and it is different again. The default for this view is to show thumbnail images of the videos like this:

Switch to details view on the View menu and it shows the name, date, type, size and length. The length is the duration of the video clip in hours, minutes and seconds. Obviously the length is not applicable to a photo or document, and again you can see that useful information is displayed about files when the folder is optimised for the contents.

Change a folder icon

Let’s suppose that you have optimised a folder for Pictures and you intend to store your digital camera photos in it. In the Properties window (right click any folder and select Properties), click the Change Icon button.

A collection of icons is displayed and you can choose the most appropriate one. In this case, a camera icon can be selected and it is perfect for this folder. Other icons can be found on the web by searching for them if none here is suitable. Click the Browse button to select a different icon on the disk.

We have now set a descriptive and interesting icon for the folder and also optimised the view for the files the folder contains. That’s much better!

Of course it would be very time consuming and tedious to go to these lengths to customise every folder on the disk. You don’t need to. Just focus on a handful of your most used folders.