Your PC is full of folders, photos, documents and other clutter. Barry Collins reveals free tools and tricks for bringing order to the mess
Duplicate photos, empty documents, long-abandoned folders and other clutter quickly turn a clean hard drive into a digital dump.
The space problem is especially pressing if you’re using a modern PC or laptop with an SSD (solid-state drive), because these drives are built for speed rather than storage. Alas, Windows (or File) Explorer isn’t as helpful as it might be when it comes to de-cluttering your files and folders, so here we’ll show you the best free third-party tools for keeping your hard drive and external drives in good working order.
Identify the space hogs
New tool TreeSize Free (www.snipca.com/15900) reveals how much space is being taken up by every folder on your local hard drive (usually C:), including the stuff that doesn’t show up in Windows Explorer. You can also use it to scan external hard drives and partitions as well as your local drive.
But the most powerful Explorer replacement is Disk Space Analyzer, which is built into Glary Utilities (www. snipca.com/15901). Click the big green Download Now button to get Glary’s installer, which doesn’t contain any adware. To open Disk Space Analyzer, run Glary, click Advanced Tools, then click the bottom one of two dots at the right of the program window. Under Disk Space on the left, click ‘Explore disks’ (‘disk’ is another word for drive). As with TreeSize, you can choose to examine both built-in and external drives. Glary will quickly come back with a clear breakdown of the drive space used by each folder (as percentages). Most of the space hogs will be in the Users folder.
Glary is great at identifying large folders of photos and videos, and you can filter your search according to types of file using the relevant tabs at the top of your scan results. If you find an unwanted folder you can delete it there and then, but don’t delete anything you’re unsure of, especially in the Windows folder.
Weed out duplicates and merge folders
It’s very easy to end up with two or more folders containing lots of wasteful, duplicate files - maybe you’ve downloaded the same photos from a digital camera twice, for example.
Open-source tool WinMerge (http://winmerge.org) is a simple way to tackle this problem. Click the green Download Now button (there’s no adware to opt out of). When you run the program, click File, then Open and choose the first folder you suspect might contain duplicates (this will appear on the left) and then the second folder (this will appear on the right). WinMerge will scan them and reveal w'hich files only appear in the left-hand or only in the right-hand folder, and which are exact copies. To clean up, click Edit, Select All and then right-click the files highlighted in blue. Choose ‘Copy Left to Right’ or ‘Copy Right to Left’, always moving to the folder that contains fewer files. All the files should now be in the target folder, meaning you can delete the other folder - but check that everything has been copied across safely first.
If you simply want to find and delete duplicate files, try Auslogics Duplicate File Finder (www.snipca.com/15902). Tlie installer doesn’t contain adware, but you should untick the offer of other Auslogics software. The program lets you target specific file types (photos, videos, documents and so on) or scan your entire hard drive. It also lets you ignore duplicates below a certain size. Once it has identified the duplicates, click the Select button, select all the duplicate files, then move them to the Recycle Bin.
Batch-edit file names and dates
If you’ve ever copied files from your digital camera to your computer, they probably arrived with unhelpful file names that are pretty useless should you ever try searching for them at a later date. The best free solution is Advanced Renamer (www.advancedrenamer.com), which comes in installable and portable versions.
Run the program, click Add in the right-hand panel and select all the files you want to rename, then click Add Method and choose a renaming option. For example, to give them all the same name plus an incremental number, choose New Name, type a name (say, Crete Holiday) then choose ‘Incremental numbers’ from the tags below. Click Start Batch, then Start in the window that appears, and the files will be renamed ‘Crete Holiday1’, ‘Crete Holiday2’ and so on.
Free tool EXIF Date Changer (www.snipca.com/15903) lets you batch-edit file dates. This is handy if, for example, you’d forgotten to set the correct time on your camera and all last year’s holiday photos think they were taken in 2007. If you use it, first go to the Options tab and untick Rename Files To - otherwise your files will be renamed as the date.
Colour-code your files and folders
One of the best ways to organise your files and folders is also one of the simplest - colour-code them. Folder Colorizer (www.snipca.com/15904 - scroll down to the Folder Colorizer and click Free Download) is a quick and simple tool for colouring specific folder icons to help them stand out in Explorer. The program is free, but make sure you click ‘Custom installation’ and untick Install 360 Total Security during installation.
To colour a folder, right-click it in Explorer and click Colorize, then choose a default colour or mix your own using the Colors option at the bottom. To colour-code your files, use XYplorerFree (www.snipca.com/15905). It lets you give each file a coloured label (for example, green for documents you’ve finished, red for ‘to-do’) so you can sort your work at a glance. The program is free and comes in installable and portable versions. Run either version, select a file, then click View, Columns and tick Label. Then, when you right-click in the empty space under Label to the right of the file, you can select a colour for that document. The file name is highlighted in your chosen colour.
WINDOWS EXPLORER SEARCH TRICKS
Windows Explorer may not be very good at helping you organise your files, but it does have some great hidden filtering tricks for searching files.
For instance, let's say you have a document called Club newsletter that you edited last week, but now you can’t find it. Type newsletter into the search box at the top right, then type datemodified: (including the colon). A little calendar will pop up, letting you narrow the search to this week, this month, this year or to a specific date.
Alternatively, type size to filter your search results according to size, or kind to sort according to file type. You can combine more than one of these filters to help you find what you’re looking for.