Do you often spend a lot of time searching and organizing files? Do you find it difficult to memorize where you stored important documents sent by your office colleagues?
Managing your files may look like a simple and straightforward task. But if you don’t have the right tools, your computer may become cluttered with a disorganized library. The odds are you will lose your important documents and photos.
We’ve come out with the best file managers for Windows 11 to help you improve your productivity and efficiency.
Everything (Free)
Everything is a fast and highly efficient desktop search utility. Everything makes it easier to find files on your computer. It lists files as you type their name. You may also search for files using different parameters such as file size, creation or modification date, file extension, etc. It also supports wildcards and gives the freedom to index and de-index specific folders.
How does Everything work?
When you install Everything, it builds an index of all files and folders on your computer. To your surprise, the entire process takes hardly 2 minutes.
Whenever you search for a file, the program looks for the file’s entry in its own database, rather than performing an independent search from scratch. This is precisely why Everything is lightweight and the results are almost instant.
Everything shows basic details about your files such as their location, size, date, etc. You can add more columns or remove the existing ones. You can right-click on a file and open, rename or delete it, just like you do in Windows Explorer.
Easy File Renamer (Paid)
While working with files and folders, there are times when you need to rename them. If you have hundreds of files to rename, manually renaming them one by one can not only be time-consuming but also lead to errors.
Easy File Renamer is the perfect file renaming tool for Windows. It provides various file renaming rules to choose from. You can also fix mismatched music tags, batch copy/ move files with zero chances of errors, and organize photos in unique folder structures.
With your subscription to EFR, you get free access to Cloud File Renamer. Using Cloud File Renamer, you can rename files on popular cloud platforms without downloading them to your PC.
Here’s a list of all the renaming rules that are available:
- New name: You can specify a completely new name for your files and folders
- Insert: You can insert a new text into your file names
- Remove: You can remove specific characters from your file names
- Replace: You can replace occurrences of specific characters
- Change case: You can change the case of your file names or folder names into upper case, lower case, or title case
- Add Prefix: You can add a text at the beginning of your file names
- Add Suffix: You can add a text at the end of your file names (before the file extensions)
- Numbering: When you have multiple files with the same name, adding numbers can be helpful
- Swap text: Use this renaming rule to change the position of two words separated by a special character
Directory Opus (Freemium)
Directory Opus is a freeware file manager and a replacement for Windows Explorer. It’s a fast, multi-threaded application that provides a tabbed interface to open and switch between multiple folders at once.
Features:
- Users can switch between single-panel and dual-panel display
- View and edit file metadata
- Easily configurable keyboard shortcuts
- Fully-fledged replacement for Windows Explorer
- Sort files, filter files, group files
- Search through your folders
- Assign colors to your files
- Batch file renaming
- Compare and synchronize the contents of 2 folders
- Supports keyboard macros
- Supports FTP
- The user interface can be customized to change fonts, colors, keyboard shortcuts, icons on the toolbar, etc
- Displays folder size, file size and gives options to export them to a file
- Works on all major Windows versions on both 32-bit/ 64-bit systems
- Supports 4K monitors
RX Explorer (Freemium)
RX Explorer is a freemium replacement for Windows Explorer. It is available as both a regular application as well as a UWP application.
RX Explorer offers an interesting feature called Secure Area. Any files stored in this location are automatically encrypted with a password so that unauthorized people cannot view or open them. The paid version of the app can be purchased for as little as $2.49.
Features:
- Set photo backgrounds to your tabs. Supports picture background, Bing background, Mica background, etc
- Vertical split view
- The Frequently Used Apps section allows you to quickly launch your most frequently used apps
- Also available as a UWP application for Windows 10 and Windows 11 that can be downloaded and installed from the Microsoft Store
- Supports Wi-Fi sharing and Bluetooth sharing features
- Supports file compression using popular archive formats
- Photos app supports basic image editing, applying filters and cropping