Hi all! I'm willing to bet that nine out of ten people reading these lines do not know how to organize files in a folder in Windows 10 by sorting and grouping, as well as display the necessary columns:"Type", “Date created”, “Date modified”, “Size”, etc?
How to organize files in a Windows 10 folder by sorting and grouping, and also display the desired columns:“Type”, “Date created”, “Date modified”, “Size” and so on
One of our readers copied a group of files to a laptop with Windows 10 installed and they looked like this in the folder, that is, it was not clear what type and size they were. Here is a detailed letter from a reader:
"Hello admin! I have a good friend with whom I study at the university and he records all the lectures on a tape recorder and then listens to them at home. I took and, with his permission, copied all the lectures to my computer, the copied files in the folder look like this.
And on my friend’s laptop, all folders contain information about the type, creation date, size and even duration of the sound file.
Moreover! If he copies more files to this folder, they will all be sorted into groups.
I also want to organize the files in the folder this way! How can I do this?»
Here's a letter!
Agree, friends, everything was noticed correctly by an inexperienced user, because if you install Windows 10 again, then there is no ordering of the location of the files in the folders and they lie, one might say, chaotically. The developer does this on purpose, giving the user a choice
make settings to your liking, and it's very easy to do.
Go to the View tab and select to display files in the "Table" folder.
Right-click on the top panel of columns and in the drop-down menu, check the required column contents: type, size, etc.
If you want, for convenience, drag the names of the required columns closer to the files with the left mouse button.
That's all.
Yes, I almost forgot, if you click “Details”, the choice of columns will be even more diverse.
If you copy more files to this folder, but with different extensions, then simply right-click on the free space of the folder and group by"T Ipu » , as a result, all files in the folder will be organized. If you wish, you can group files by name, size, etc.
You can reset the grouping settings by clicking on “No” and then all changes will be reset.
If you have a whole bunch of photos and videos on your computer and all this is scattered in different folders, then sometimes you want to look at photos from a certain period of time (for example, for a year) and doing this turns out to be very difficult!
Of course, you can put everything together, put it in one folder, but you will still have to organize all this stuff by year, month, or otherwise, depending on how necessary.
Let's look at 2 ways to organize photos and videos (together or separately, it doesn't matter) so that you can easily navigate, even if there are a lot of files, for example, several thousand.
The easiest and most convenient way to organize all your photos and videos so that you can easily navigate through them is to group them all in the so-called Windows library (or several).
WHAT ARE FILE LIBRARIES IN WINDOWS
Libraries are separate folders that group files according to a certain criterion (for example, music, images, videos, general) and allow you to work with these files more conveniently, for example, if you take images or videos, you can organize them by date, which is not possible in ordinary folders cannot be done.
On Windows, the following libraries are initially created:
- Video;
- Images;
- Documentation;
- Music.
Accordingly, each of them is intended for a specific type of file, as is clear from the names.
Libraries are displayed directly in Windows Explorer, in the left column:
You can rename the libraries as needed. For example, it is not necessary to split videos and images into separate libraries. Yes, it will be more correct and more orderly, but for some it may be convenient to put everything in one pile, including photos and videos. In this case, you can rename the “Images” library, for example, “Video and Photos” and put both there. The “Images” library itself will allow you to organize videos correctly, since the settings of these libraries are very similar.
You can create new libraries if you wish. But usually this is not necessary. Since the ones already available by default are sufficient for any type of file.
ORGANIZING PHOTO/VIDEO IN LIBRARIES
Transferring photo/video collections to the library
The first thing you need to do is transfer all your photos and videos scattered around your computer to one or more libraries. Decide right away whether you will store photos and videos separately, i.e. in different libraries, as originally intended in Windows, or everything is in the heap. Let me remind you that you can do it this way and it will work.
According to your choice, collect all the photos and videos from your computer into the appropriate folders: “Images” and “Videos” (or everything in “Images”).
If your computer is such a mess that it is difficult to manually find all the photos and videos scattered in different folders, then you can use the WinDirStat program to help. It allows you to evaluate which files (by category) are taking up space on your computer and where they are located.
Photos and videos should be moved to folders, not libraries. You can find the “Images”, “Videos” and others folders in your user’s folder (for older operating systems), or in the “This PC” section (for new systems, for example, Windows 10).
The libraries themselves are formed from just some of these folders.
If you already had photos and videos in some other folders, then you can transfer them entirely in the folders. It is not necessary to move files separately. Example:
Organize by date
After you have moved your entire collection to the “images” and “videos” folders or to one of them, open the corresponding library through the “Libraries” section (shown above). Initially, of course, there will be no order there. Everything will look something like this:
But since the collection is now in the library, everything can be easily organized by date.
To do this, right-click on an empty space in the library (hereinafter referred to as “RMB”) and select “arrange”, then select the value “day” or “month”. When you select “month,” your collection will be organized by month, with the year next to it. Example:
And now you can open a specific month and see photos for this period. Once in the folder of the selected month, the photos in it will already be organized by day (see below).
When you select “day”, the entire collection in the folder will be organized according to day:
By clicking on the arrows opposite a certain day, you can hide photos/videos for that day:
If you want to cancel the ordering, i.e. To enable the normal display view, then select “Folder” from the “Arrange” menu.
Note! Windows organizes photos and videos primarily by parameters such as “date taken” (for photos) and “date media created” (for videos). These parameters are usually set to the file by the device itself on which the shooting was carried out. You can see them and change them through the file properties (right-click on the file and select “Properties”), in the “Details” tab.
Video media creation date
If for some reason this data is not in the file (for example, the device did not create it when shooting), then the photos and videos will be sorted by the date the file was created:
But this is not good, because the creation date of the file changes every time it is copied to another folder, to another drive, etc. It is always better to indicate the date of shooting and the date of creation of multimedia!
More refined filtering by dates
You can filter your collections even more finely, for example, select a specific day or range of days (weeks, months, etc.) for which you want to display photos/videos.
Before this, you need to change the file display option to “table”. To do this, right-click in the window area and select “view” - “table”. The files in the folder will be displayed in the form of a table, indicating the date, size and other parameters in the corresponding cells:
Now by clicking to the right of the “Dates” column you can select a specific day or range of dates, weeks, months, years. For example, we want to display photos/videos only for the dates from November 11, 2016 to November 30 of the same year. Select the range with the mouse and all elements that do not correspond to the specified dates will disappear in the Explorer window.
If you need to cancel filtering, then also open the window of the selected filter and uncheck it (see image above).
Ability to group files according to different criteria
In addition to organizing the collection by date, you can also group by certain criteria, for example, by file type, and in this case all displayed files will be conveniently grouped. Example:
From the example above we see that 3 groups have been created, according to file types, the unnecessary ones can be collapsed so as not to get in the way. This is convenient when there are a large number of different files in a folder, when you need to view only files of certain types. For example, we want to separate photos and videos by grouping them accordingly. By selecting grouping by file type, we will see separately video files grouped by file type (MP4, MOV, etc.) and photos grouped similarly (JPG, PNG, etc.).
To perform grouping, right-click in the desired folder, select “Grouping” and in the submenu that opens, specify the desired grouping option, for example, “Type” (just “by file type”, as described above in the example).
There are different grouping options besides file type. If the desired option is not in the list (it happens that the “Type” option is also missing), in the grouping submenu, click “Details”.
In the window that opens, check the box next to the desired grouping options that you will use and click “OK.” They will now appear in the list of grouping options.
If you want to cancel grouping, select “No” in the list of options.
You should be aware that grouping is not available if you have selected an ordering option, such as “month” or “day”. Grouping only works when ordering is disabled, i.e. the “folder” option is selected (see above).
CONCLUSION
In fact, for those who have a large collection of photos and videos, it will always be important to be able to quickly organize everything by date or group it. It is convenient and very easy to do.
If you have anything to add or any questions about the article, leave it in the comments, I won’t miss anything! :)
Do you have a lot of photos and videos stored on your computer? :) How do you organize your multimedia collections?
Many people don’t like the random arrangement of elements. So let's look at this moment: how to organize files in a folder in Windows 7, namely sorting and grouping.
If there are not many elements, you can still figure it out, but it happens that there are a very large number of files with different extensions or folders. Such an extensive list will be difficult to comprehend. Of course, when everything is laid out on the shelves, it is much more convenient. For this purpose, OS developers came up with special ordering filter settings.
Basic filtering of files and folders: sorting and grouping
You can organize your lists using options:
-sorting – With this setting, you can quickly organize files by size, type (documents, program shortcuts, images, etc.) and much more. To use this option, right-click on any empty space in Explorer. In the context menu, point to the “sorting” item and select the option you want.
You can also use other sorting filters. To do this, select “more details” in the context menu. The “select columns in the table” window will open in front of you. Use the checkboxes to mark which options you want to add. Press the “up” and “down” buttons to determine their location in the context menu.
Don’t forget about the “Ascending” and “Descending” items. If we select the first option, then the sorting will be from 0-9, from A-Z, if the second option, then from Z-A, from 9-0.
By combining sorting types you can get excellent organizing files in a folder in Windows 7. For example, the filter will arrange groups of files by type, and at the same time in ascending order.
- Grouping– with this setting, you can create groups of files and folders by size, name, type. This means you can separate the elements you need from the others.
To use this feature, right-click on an empty space in Windows 7 Explorer. From the menu that appears, select “Grouping” and set any grouping item.
Note: The above methods only apply to the current folder. Any newly added additional ordering options will appear in both the “Sorting” and “Grouping” options.
To get rid of grouping elements, click on “(No)”, then all changes will disappear.
The sorting and grouping options can be used simultaneously. For example, you can group by size or type and sort that group by date, name, or other properties.
If you left-click on the group name, then the elements.
Advanced filtering for organizing files and folders in Windows 7: sorting and grouping
For the following filtering options, you must use the Tile view. Advanced options can be considered an extension of grouping by filtering. You can even use this to filter based on very specific criteria.
In Tile view, you have multiple columns such as name, data, size, etc. If you hover over the column, you will notice a small arrow on the right side. Click on it and you will see several options that allow you to organize into specific groups (for example, files named A to K).
Select an option and you will see how only files and folders according to the specified criteria will remain. Additionally, you will see a small check mark on the right side of the column, indicating that the filter is active.
You can select from multiple columns based on different criteria. Additionally, it is possible to use the search box to filter even more specific results. To disable advanced grouping, simply uncheck the option.
As you can see, the Explorer window can be quite powerful organize files in a folder in Windows 7. After a little experimentation, you will get used to all the available options and quickly find the elements you are looking for.
Even if your files are rationally systematized, you probably cannot find every document easily, and some have completely forgotten about their existence. The search system is indispensable if you know what to look for (as I described in my article “”). But when searching for forgotten files, it is of little use.Fortunately, you can use another Explorer feature to do this - Arrange By. It provides a unique view of the data stored on your hard drive and helps you find long-forgotten documents or unnecessary files that are wasting precious space. In this article, I'll show you how to sort your files using the Organize function.
How does the Arrange feature work?
As the name suggests, the Organize feature allows you to organize your files in different ways depending on the option you choose. This feature is available in the Library panel in all the Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos libraries. To see this panel, you need to go directly to the library. If you go to the library from the “C:\Users” folder, the panel will not be there.
The Organize feature offers different options for grouping files according to the type of content stored in the library. However, different ordering methods work differently depending on the library.
It is also worth considering that different grouping methods use different presentation options for ease of perception. Some switch the current view to Large Icons, others use the Table view. However, you can change the view yourself to any other. To undo the grouping and restore the original view, you can use the Clear Changes option in the Arrange menu.
Library "Documents"
Let's take a look at how the Arrange feature works in the Documents library. To see the available grouping options (Figure A), click on the arrow in the Arrange menu. Each of the listed options organizes all files in the library according to one principle or another, while the folders in which the files are stored are not displayed.
Figure A: The Organize menu is available in the Library panel for each of the major libraries.
As you can see, the Folders option is selected by default - this is the standard way to organize files. Other options present files in a whole new light - let's see which one.
The Author option groups files into piles based on author (Figure B). As you can see, the “Greg Shultz” stack contains 2,305 documents of my authorship. Double-clicking on this stack opens a list of files I created, the properties of which indicate the author. In my case, these are Microsoft Office files - Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, Access databases and PowerPoint presentations.
Figure B: Organize by author groups documents into stacks based on the author name specified in the file properties.
In this way, I can find documents created by my friends and colleagues, or files from completely unknown authors, sent by email or downloaded from the Internet. This feature can be very useful for several reasons.
In addition, I discovered and deleted 80 megabytes of completely unnecessary documents from the BED Web Team, Valued Acer Customer and Gainsville College that I had once downloaded from the Internet. They only wasted space on the hard drive, and were also regularly archived, taking up extra time and needlessly increasing the volume of the backup copy.
I even managed to find a whole mountain of photos that I received from my father via Windows Messenger. They were labeled with his name and stored in the My Received Files folder. I had been meaning to move them to the “Pictures” folder for a long time and even thought that I had accidentally deleted them. Now I have finally saved these photos in the right folder and can admire them for my pleasure.
"Date of change"
The “Date Modified” option groups files into groups by modification date: “Today”, “Yesterday”, “Last Week” and “A Long Time Ago” . There were so many files on my computer that I had to select the Table view and use the Collapse All Groups option in the View menu in order to somehow manage the list (Fig. .C).
Figure C. The Date Modified option groups files into groups by date modified.
As you can see, the “Long ago” group contains a huge number of files. To view them and remove unnecessary ones, I double-clicked on the group, then clicked on the “Date modified” column to sort in ascending order and found a bunch of files from 1995, which I began to study.
"Tag"
The Tags option groups files by keywords. For ease of reference, I chose the List view (Figure D), was amazed at how many documents I had with keywords, and realized how effective using tags can be to identify files.
Figure D: The Tag option groups files by keyword.
"Type"
The Type option groups files by type. Because different file types have different icons, I chose the Medium Icons view (Figure E) for ease of reference. Expanding the Bitmap stack, I was surprised to find a ton of images in the BMP format, which is known to be quite large. The list of files in the stack is displayed in Table mode, so I sorted the images in descending order of size and found a BMP file of just over 5 megabytes in size, and in total there were almost 500 megabytes of such images.
Figure E: Files organized by type are best viewed in Normal Icons mode.
After going through all the BMP files, I deleted half and converted the other half to JPG format.
"Name"
The "Name" option sorts the files alphabetically and displays them in one huge list, which, in my opinion, makes no sense. For example, my Documents library contains 25 thousand files. The alphabetical list, of course, can be sorted and filtered, but in my opinion, this option is quite useless.
Other libraries
As I mentioned, the Organize feature offers different ways to group files depending on the type of content in different libraries. Each of these methods provides a unique representation of files. The organizing options for the Music, Pictures, and Video libraries are shown in Figure 1. F.
The available file sorting methods depend on the type of file you are using. folder view mode. You can change the current mode using the list or icons on the toolbar.
View as icons
To sort files in a different order, click the view options button in the toolbar and choose By Name , By Size , By Type , By Modification Date , or By Access Date .
You can sort in the reverse order by selecting Reversed Order from the menu.
List view
To change how files are sorted, click on the header of one of the columns in the file manager. For example, click Type to sort files by type. Click on the column header again to sort the files in reverse order.
In list view, you can show columns with more attributes and sort on those columns. Click the view options button in the toolbar, pick Visible Columns… and select the columns that you want to be visible. You will then be able to sort by those columns. See Files list columns preferences for descriptions of available columns.