How to Keep Windows 10 Organized, Beautiful, and Productive
Microsoft Windows can get confusing. This is not (always) a bug of the operating system. You download tons of apps and files and create new content yourself, until your Downloads directory looks like a dump of old content. Your desktop is so packed with icons that you can’t see your pretty wallpapers. Your Start Menu looks like an Application Drawer. In short, your operating system is a mess, but it cannot be fixed.
At Lifehacker, we take spring cleaning very seriously. We are far from missing out on an opportunity to refresh, reorganize and streamline our home life. We’re also very excited to hit the reset button with our technology, take a close look at our finances, and get the better of our day-to-day habits that have gotten a little musty. Welcome to Spring Cleaning Week as we clear away the winter cobwebs and set the stage for the sunny days ahead. Let’s clean up, okay?
There are several free applications you can use to add much needed organization to your Windows world. Here are a few of our favorites:
Give it up
We covered this app a long time ago , but it should be resurrected. DropIt is a great utility that can help you stay organized if you are the type of person who dumps everything you download (or copy to your computer) into one folder – one giant, sprawling hub where many files go. but rarely leave.
DropIt allows you to set a ton of different rules that are triggered whenever you drop files onto the utility’s little icon. For example, you can configure your application to always move image files to your main photos folder, video files to your video folder, and Word documents — you guessed it — to your documents folder.
This is just the beginning. If you want to get more advanced, DropIt can automatically scan folders (like your downloads folder) and apply more advanced filters to anything it finds, like automatically unpack archives, rename files based on your options, or compress large batches of files that otherwise taking up a little more space than you want.
Automation is a great way to help you stay organized on Windows, and DropIt practically gives you a virtual assistant at your fingertips.
digiKam
If your vast photo library needs some serious organization but you don’t want to pay for something like Adobe Lightroom, the open source digiKam app is a great alternative.
Use this app to sort your photos and create (or edit) metadata so you can find exactly what you’re looking for in one simple library. If you are also a bit of a perfectionist in photography, you can use digiKam to edit your regular and RAW photos to make them perfect.
This app is a much better solution for organizing your snapshots than just dropping them into arbitrary Windows folders. Your disorganized hard drive will thank you and you are much less likely to lose (or forget) images in the future.
LaunchBox
We’re not going to ask why you have a bunch of emulators installed on your system, and we’re going to assume that all the ROMs scattered throughout the nightmare of the folder structure in the Games section of your hard drive are full. legal. Right? Either way, if you’ve just spent your last day feeling nostalgic by downloading archives of thousands of different retro games to play on your modern PC, keeping those games in check will be tricky.
We suggest taking LaunchBox , an excellent game organizer utility that lets you quickly find and play titles in your giant library. You can hook into the app’s crowdsourced database to populate your titles with useful information like release dates, genres, publishers, and images, and you can mark certain games as favorites to make it easier to find a topic when you have a little time to kill.
LaunchBox also makes it easy (to some extent) to import games from your favorite distribution services likeSteam , Battle.net, and GoG ( just to name a few). If you’re the biggest gamer in the world, playing anything downloadable and always taking new games to try out of all the major services, LaunchBox is a great way to organize your games under one digital roof.
AquaSnap
Everyone knows Windows Aero Snap shortcuts, right? Press the Windows key + one of the arrow keys on your keyboard to make your active window fly all over the screen: minimize, open, shrink to fill a quarter or half of the screen, and bounce completely off the main display (if you have a multiple monitor setup).
AquaSnap takes this concept and develops it. You can snap windows to different parts of the screen, just like with Aero Snap, but you can do a lot more as well.
For example, if you have three windows open in a nicely tiled configuration, you can resize all three on the fly by simply dragging your mouse pointer — each one expands and contracts as needed. Now your windows can snap to each other, not just the corners of the display, and you can move connected apps around as one big chunk of a group.
Double clicking on the edge of the window allows it to expand in that direction to fill the entire screen, which is a handy trick. Capturing an application window and shaking it with the mouse – yes, shaking – makes the window transparent and sets it “always on top” of any other open windows. It’s a great little feature if you need to access something like a calculator but don’t want it to get in the way when you’re not using it.
And if you want to go crazy, you can control your Windows magic with AquaSnap keyboard hotkeys. Your colleagues and friends will love your crazy window opening skills.
Tile
If you’re the type of person who categorizes their smartphone apps by color , you’ll loveTileIconifier . While it will take a little of your time, if you’re crazy about what your Start Menu looks like, this utility allows you to customize your application tiles.
For example, if you like a certain color (green) and are upset that your favorite app’s tile background color doesn’t match your chromatic preferences, you can fix that. You can upload your own image to use as a medium or small tile (sorry, large or wide tiles are not supported), or you can simply use an existing app icon (scaled to any size) with any background color you want. You can also make light and dark versions of the icon in case you ever want to change your Windows theme.
Of course, the background of most of your icons should just switch to whatever color you choose as an accent in Windows 10 (Settings> Personalization> Colors). TileIconifier is a great way to bend more durable badges to your will, or worse, replace every official badge on your tiles with a different image of a cute animal. (And send us a screenshot if you go that route.)