Looking for a Windows Explorer replacement

Doomer

Diamond Member
Dec 5, 1999
3,721
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0
When working with 10s of thousands of file, Windows Explore is way too slow. I tried Total Commander and it was even slower (ridiculously slow in fact).

What I need is a program that does not index, thumbnail or otherwise do anything other than manipulate the files.

Back story: I have several ip security cameras that are set to take snapshots when they detect motion. They take a lot of snapshots. I'm currently trying to delete to delete 153,000 of them from a single folder and Win Explorer is gagging, puking and crashing because it's doing crap other than deleting the files. I tried turning off indexing and it makes no difference whatsoever.

Does anyone have experience working with large numbers of files that can recommend a solution.
 

R0H1T

Platinum Member
Jan 12, 2013
2,582
163
106
So I take it you're looking to delete photos/videos from that folder & Windows creating thumbnails for you makes it nigh impossible to do what you mentioned in the OP right ? If so then do the following ~

  1. Right click from inside the folder & select the top option i.e. view as "details" or "list" then try selecting all the files with Ctrl+A & see if you're able to delete them in one go.
  2. If however you're not able to access the folder it maybe due to the fact that the thumbnail cache is not able to load all the files' preview with thumbnailing enabled, in such a case disable caching of thumbnails & repeat the step above to delete the files.
For more info on disabling the thumbnail cache see this ~
HTML:
www.technoleros.com/turn-off-caching-of-windows-7-thumbnails-in-hidden-thumbs-db-files/

Now if you're still not able to access/delete those files then I'm guessing you have a bunch of bad sectors on you're hard drive & depending on the repair job check disk is able to pull off you may be able to delete the files eventually.
 

Sheep221

Golden Member
Oct 28, 2012
1,843
27
81
try older version of total commander, last time I updated was in february 2005 with 6.51 release and using it to this day for its stability and speed when transfering or deleting huge amounts of files
 
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postmark

Senior member
May 17, 2011
307
0
0
seriously, the best bet is cmd line for this. just do this:

start - run - type "cmd"

on the command window change directories to your path (let's say it's d:\photos\ you would type this:
d:
cd photos
)

now at this point, just do this:

del *.jpg

this will delete all jpg files in the current directory.
 

Carson Dyle

Diamond Member
Jul 2, 2012
8,173
524
126
For something like that, I would run a scheduled task that handles the files. If you need to keep the files, even for just limited amount of time, I would move the files into a .zip (or .rar or similar) archive file rather than leaving them out in the file system.