How to show recently added files and photos in Windows

Sometimes you know you created a document, photo or some other file on your Windows PC, but you cannot remember where you put it. Here’s how to show the most recent files in Explorer..

One way to avoid losing files is to keep them organised and to use folders like the Documents folder, the Pictures folder and so on. However, it becomes complicated when you add in the Public folders and libraries, which are groups of folders. There are also online drives like OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive that may be synced with the computer. I have at least four Documents folders!

Now which one did I save that document in that I created last week?

There are similar problems with the Pictures folders and there are multiple ones and libraries. Photos on your phone are synced to the cloud and then synced back to the PC, so where are the photos you took last week?

We can try to organise documents and photos into subfolders by date, occasion, subject or whatever is most useful, but how do you view the most recently added files?

Explorer can find the latest documents, photos, or other files very easily and it uses a feature you may not have discovered - date searches.

This works in all versions of Windows - 7, 8 and 10. It isn’t specific to any type of file and it can be used to find the most recent files in any folder and its subfolders. It is a useful trick to learn and it makes finding files much easier than browsing in Explorer or searching for filenames, that is if you can remember what file you are looking for.

Search by date in Explorer

Open an Explorer window by clicking the icon in the taskbar.

Go to a folder you want to search, such as C:\Users\YourName to search everywhere you are likely to have saved files, or narrow it down to a specific folder such as your Documents folder, Pictures folder or OneDrive folder.

Click in the search box in the top right corner and type date: The colon triggers a calendar display and you can select any specific day. Below are some predefined date ranges like Today, Yesterday, Last Week and so on. Click one to quickly find files in that date range.

This is a great way to show your most recent files.

Windows search isn’t fast when the whole disk is being searched, so give it a minute or two. When it has finished, go to Explorer’s View tab and select your favourite view.

Here I selected Details view and clicked the Date modified column header to sort by date (click again to flip the sort by ascending or descending values).

You can go ahead and double click a file to open it, but there is a Folder column in Details view that shows the folder where each file is stored. Right click a file and select Open file location on the menu that is displayed, or select a file, select the Search tab and click Open file location.

Save your searches

Also on the Search tab is Save search. Click this and choose a place to save the search. It creates a shortcut and you could save a search for last week’s files as a shortcut on the desktop. Double click it and all your recent files are displayed.

Search a range of dates in Explorer

So far we have seen how to search for predefined date ranges, but what if you know you saved a file somewhere around the middle of last month, but you don’t know exactly which day. One option would be to select Last month on the calendar, but that might return too many files. There is a way to search a range of dates.

Here is a much more complicated search:

1. Go to the folder to search, like OneDrive or C:\Users\YourName
2. Click in the search box
3. Type date:
4. Click the first date in the calendar and Shift+click the second
5. Click in the search box again
6. Type a space followed by *.docx

I selected a date range to narrow the search results to the 10th - 20th July and narrowed it further by adding *.docx so only Word documents between these dates were displayed.

Searching for files by date ranges is very easy in Windows and you can save your favourite ones so they can be run with a click of the mouse. Add a file extension to a date search and it filters the results and makes it even easier to track down lost files.