Explorer Helper

Clean and organize any folder straight from the Windows Explorer right-click menu. Right-click a folder (or the background of an open folder), hit Clean this folder, and triage its contents with previews and keyboard shortcuts.

🌐 Visit the project site for a visual tour of the app, or jump straight to the latest release.

Features

• Explorer context menu: "Clean this folder" on folders and folder backgrounds (per-user, no admin required)
• Triage mode: clear out a folder by reviewing one file at a time like a dating app. Swipe (or ←/→) to reject or keep, ↓ skips, Backspace rewinds. Nothing touches the disk while you swipe. A review screen shows both piles (swap or unmark any file), then one Commit applies everything. The commit has three independent switches: send rejects to the Recycle Bin (on by default, or leave them in place), and move or copy the keepers to a folder of your choice, so you can pull the good shots off an SD card without touching it. One Ctrl+Z reverses the whole commit. K/X/U flag files straight from the list, so you can triage without opening the deck at all
• Browse in place: Enter or double-click a folder to go into it, with back / forward / up buttons, a clickable breadcrumb, and Alt+←, Alt+→, Alt+↑ and Backspace on the keyboard. Stepping up and back down puts you on the file you left
• Marks that span folders: keep and reject decisions follow you from folder to folder. A toolbar pill counts what is pending ("37 marks in 5 folders") with a Discard button next to it, and the commit dialog breaks the marks down per folder so you can apply everything or only the folder you are looking at
• Folder sizes: the Size column shows what each subfolder holds, instead of a blank cell. Windows caches no folder size, so each one costs a walk of the tree: direct-child counts land first, then the subtree total counts up in place. Sorting by Size ranks folders by weight, which is the point of the column when you are deciding what to clean. Junctions read link rather than double-counting their target, and a folder Windows refuses to read reads no access instead of 0 B
• Previews: images render natively, videos play inline with a scrub timeline (play/pause, elapsed/total time, and a draggable slider to jump anywhere in the clip), audio shows a speaker so you can tell a file is selected and playing, PDFs render via the built-in Edge WebView2 viewer, and everything else shows the same thumbnail Explorer would
• Preview details: a strip under the preview shows the selected file's metadata (type, size, item count for folders, resolution, length, frame rate, bit rate, created/modified dates). Each detail type is toggleable in Settings, and media-only rows appear only for files that have them
• Shell thumbnails in the file list for every file type Windows knows how to thumbnail
• Keyboard triage: Del sends to the Recycle Bin (never permanent deletion), F2 renames, Enter opens
• Undo: Ctrl+Z reverses the last rename, delete, or triage commit; deleted files come back out of the Recycle Bin
• Quick rename: review files one by one and name them fast. Type a name, press Enter to rename and jump to the next file. Collisions auto-number (Clip, Clip 2, Clip 3…), the extension is preserved, and a session name palette re-applies recent names in a click. Built for triaging a folder of clips or screenshots
• Quick-use buttons: build a name in one click from your own preset buttons (add them from the + under the rename box, manage them in Settings), plus two dynamic date buttons that insert today's date or the selected file's created date. The date formats are configurable in Settings using standard .NET date/time patterns (yyyy-MM-dd, hh:mm tt, …); the button row scrolls horizontally when it fills up
• Filter & sort by name, size, date, or type, with folders always listed first
• Automatic updates: the app checks GitHub for a newer release on startup (toggleable in Settings); when one ships, an update button appears in the toolbar. On an installed copy one click downloads it, installs silently, and restarts the app right where you were. The portable build opens the release page instead, since swapping a running loose exe isn't safe
• Multi-select delete, open in Explorer, one-click context-menu install/uninstall from inside the app

Planned work lives in the issue tracker.

Install

⬇ Download the latest installer: grab ExplorerHelper-Setup-*.exe from the release assets and run it. It installs per-user (no admin prompt) and registers the context-menu entries; uninstalling removes them again. A portable zip is also published with each release. With the portable version, use the Add context menu button inside the app.

Windows 11 note: the entry appears under Show more options (the classic menu), or on Shift+right-click. For a top-level Windows 11 menu entry (no "Show more options" detour), build the sparse MSIX package. See packaging/README.md.

Building locally

Requires the .NET SDK 8 or newer.

# Debug run
dotnet run --project src/ExplorerHelper

# Publish self-contained exe + portable zip into artifacts/
# Version comes from Directory.Build.props; pass -Version only to override it.
./build.ps1

# Also compile the installer (requires Inno Setup 6: winget install JRSoftware.InnoSetup)
./build.ps1 -Installer

Releasing

From an up-to-date main with a clean tree:

./release.ps1 -Version 0.7.0

That bumps Directory.Build.props, commits, tags v0.7.0, and pushes the commit and tag. The release workflow then builds the zip and installer and attaches them to a GitHub Release with generated notes. Watch it with gh run watch.

Add -WhatIf to see the plan without touching anything, or -Branch <name> to cut from somewhere other than main. The script refuses to run on the wrong branch, with uncommitted changes, out of sync with origin, or onto a tag that already exists, and it checks all of that before it writes anything.

The version lives in Directory.Build.props and nowhere else. Both projects inherit it and build.ps1 defaults to it. Don't edit it by hand: release.yml refuses to build a tag that disagrees with it, and tagging a commit that predates the bump is how v0.6.0 failed (issue #46).

If a release does fail the version check, the tag is pointing at the wrong commit. Land the bump, then move it:

git checkout main; git pull; git tag -f v0.7.0; git push origin -f v0.7.0

Tech notes

• WPF on .NET 8 (net8.0-windows), MVVM via CommunityToolkit.Mvvm
• Two projects: the app, plus ExplorerHelper.ShellExtension, an IExplorerCommand COM handler used only by the optional Windows 11 sparse MSIX package
• Thumbnails come from the Windows shell (IShellItemImageFactory), the same images Explorer shows
• Media metadata in the preview details strip (resolution, length, frame rate, bit rate) is read from the shell property store (IPropertyStore), so there's no codec dependency
• Folder sizes come from FileSystemEnumerable, reading each entry's length off the WIN32_FIND_DATA the OS already returned. That runs 3-5x faster than a DirectoryInfo walk, which allocates a FileInfo and issues a second stat call per entry. Completed subtree totals are cached for the session and dropped when the app writes under the path
• Deletes go through IFileOperation with FOF_ALLOWUNDO, so everything lands in the Recycle Bin. The operation's progress sink captures each item's $R… path inside the bin, which is what lets in-app undo restore files without parsing the bin's localized columns
• Context menu entries live under HKCU\Software\Classes\Directory\shell (and Directory\Background\shell)

License

MIT