Issue 633 • 8 – 21 June 2022 51MANAGE YOUR FILES LIKE AN EXPERT
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Find and remove
space-hogging files
The excellent program TreeSize Free
can help you find and delete files you’ve
lost track of and have outlived their
usefulness. Download the ‘TreeSizeFree-
Portable.zip’ file from http://www.snipca.
com/42021, unzip it, then right-click
‘TreeSizeFree.exe’ and choose ‘Run as
administrator’ so it can scan folders that
would otherwise be locked.
Click ‘Select Directory’, then ‘This PC’
in the File Explorer sidebar, followed by
C:. Now click Select Folder, and TreeSize
Free will scan your entire drive, and order
your folders by size, with the largest first.
Much of what it finds will be Windows
system files, so be careful what you
remove. Expand the Users folder, and
your own folder inside it, then explore
the directories within. As you can see
from our screenshot, where we’re
working our way through the ‘nik’ user
folder^1 we have more than 125GB of old
files sitting in the Downloads folder^2 ,
many of which can be removed.
This includes four versions of the
Raspberry Pi operating system, occupying
almost 11GB^3 , that we installed several
years ago. To delete a file, right-click it,
then click Delete in the context menu.
Also check the ‘Program Files and
‘Program Files (x86)’ folders for
particularly large sub-folders containing
software you no longer use. Rather than
delete these directly through TreeSize
Free, though, you can uninstall them via
Windows. In Windows 10, open Settings
(press Windows key+I), then click Apps,
followed by ‘Apps & features’ on the left.
Now, in the middle pane, click an app you
want to remove, then click Uninstall.In Windows 11, click Apps, followed by
Installed Apps, then click the three dots
beside any you want to remove, followed
by Uninstall.2
Rename all your files in one go
Your camera or smartphone labels
every picture with a prefix and serial
number. This ensures new pictures don’t
overwrite old ones, but does nothing to
help you tell them apart. Renaming
batches of pictures so they’re more
recognisable will help you search for
them later.
Install Bulk Rename Utility (www.
snipca.com/42022), launch it, then in the
top-left pane navigate to the folder
containing the images you want to
rename (^1 in our screenshot below)
Select these images in the main pane^2 ,
then use the fields below to implement
your changes. We’re using the Remove
option to strip out the first eight
characters^3 , which deletes everything
before the ‘.JPG’ file extension, then Add
to prefix the new filename with ‘Blackpool
Trip June 2020 -’^4 and Numbering^5 toadd a sequential number to the end of
each file name. You can preview your
changes in real time in the main pane.
When you’ve finished, click Rename to
process your selected files.3
Search for missing files
When you’ve been working on a
document but lost track of where you
saved it, you need to be able to search for
it without using its name.
NirSoft’s powerful SearchMyFiles
(www.snipca.com/42024) does the job.
When you run it, use the box that
appears to tell the program as much as
you can about the file you’re looking for.
In our screenshot below, we’ve told it to
only search our user folder^1 , and selected
‘No’ for every option in the Attributes
box^2 , so we don’t get an enormous list of
system files. Finally, we know that the file
we want to find was created within the
last two weeks, so we’ve specified 14 days
in the File Time box^3.
When you’ve given as much information
as you can, click Start Search to scour
your selected folders for your missing file.TreeSize Free
found 125GB
of old files that
we can safely
removeUse Bulk Rename
Utility to re-label
your images in one
batch and see the
changes as they
happenTell SearchMyFiles where on your computer
to look for missing files1
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