Question Free sorting of files in a folder

[Dimitri001]

Is there some way to make Windows let you sort the files in the folder as you wish by dragging and dropping them, rather than by having Windows sort the files automatically based on your chosen criterion (date or size etc.)?

 

[Deleted member 14196]

No

 

[Lafong]

Not that I've heard about.

I sometimes cheat by putting an underscore as the first character of a file name to force it to sort to the top, alphabetically.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Is there some way to make Windows let you sort the files in the folder as you wish by dragging and dropping them, rather than by having Windows sort the files automatically based on your chosen criterion (date or size etc.)?

Not with the default "File Explorer". There may be something out there, free or otherwise that may allow that but I wouldn't count on it.

 

[Dimitri001]

Very frustrating, because this used to be a standard feature in Windows.

Anyway, I've submitted a request to have it restored to Microsoft's Feedback Hub, so if anyone else wants to see this feature back, you can vote for my request here: https://aka.ms/AAlcj22

 

[hotaru.hino]

I don't see a point in it, because it'll add even more processing overhead to File Explorer and there's literally dozens of features about a file that you can sort by.

Like what esoteric sorting method are you using?

 

[USAFRet]

What criteria are you looking to sort by, that isn't already there?

 

[Ralston18]

"As you wish"......

Just out of curiosity: what arrangement are you seeking?

For example - perhaps that certain files visually appear (text or icon) at the top or in some other given arrangement?

Before anything can be done there needs to be some criteria/rules to determine the sort within the folder.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Also to expand on the issue with arbitrary sorting is that NTFS uses what's called a B-Tree to store the contents of a directory. This is to allow for high performance of file system operations. Previously Windows used FAT or at least allowed usage of FAT, which stored files in a table. So my guess is arbitrary sorting in a FAT type partition is doable because the file system probably just reads through the table and it could be every time you sort, it rearranges the table, and back then, it wasn't expected that you would have a lot of files.

In any case, if Microsoft were to support arbitrary sorting in NTFS, for every directory that's having it, a table containing the actual sorting would have to be created. And then there's the problem that if you add and remove files, this table would have to be resized accordingly. So basically you're adding a bunch of file system operations just by dragging an icon around.

 

[Dimitri001]

What criteria are you looking to sort by, that isn't already there?

I don't want it to autosort by any criterion, I wan to be able to arrange the individual files freely.

"As you wish"......

Just out of curiosity: what arrangement are you seeking?

For example - perhaps that certain files visually appear (text or icon) at the top or in some other given arrangement?

Before anything can be done there needs to be some criteria/rules to determine the sort within the folder.

I have a folder with a huge number of pictures and some of the pictures are connected by a shared theme, so if I find a new picture that belongs with a group of pics I downloaded a month ago, there's no way to group them with those.

I don't want to create separate folders for each theme because the point is to be able to scroll through the images in the folder with an image viewer.

 

[USAFRet]

I don't want it to autosort by any criterion, I wan to be able to arrange the individual files freely.

Then there would need to be some metadata...some tagging...applied to each file, to be able to sort or filter by.

This is not a Windows function.
But many other applications have something like this.