How can I copy or move a group of files into a new folder from Explorer?
Raymond Chen
Here’s how you copy or move a group of files into a new folder.
- Select the files and folders you want to copy or move.
- Click the Move to or Copy to button, corresponding to what you want to do.
- In the flyout, click Choose location… at the bottom.
- Go to where you want the new folder to be created and click the Make New Folder button.
- Give your new folder a name.
- Select your new folder and say OK.
Bonus shortcut: Right-click the files and folders, then go to Send to and say Compressed (zip) folder. This creates a new ZIP file from the files and folders you selected. I use this shortcut a lot.
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I’ve only ever seen the term “flyout” used by Microsoft.
I’m not even sure if it is a correct term here. The sidebar thing on the right in Windows 8 was called a flyout and some larger notification icon UIs might be called flyouts but on a toolbar button it is called a dropdown. The overflow dropdown (which is not connected to a specific button) in a toolbar is often called the chevron menu back in the IE3/4 days when rebars/coolbars were the new thing.
They also seem to be called dropdowns in the Ribbon.
The way I do it is:
– Open 2 explorer windows, one with the source and the other with the destination.
– Create a new folder in the destination.
– In the source, select the files and folders to copy/move.
– Drag them from the source window to the new folder in the destination window (if the default drag operation isn’t the good one, I do a cut/paste or a copy/paste instead, or drag with the right click).
This post was inspired by questions from people who want to perform the operation directly from a single window.
I have never understood the need for copy as path. It is simple to paste filenames from hdrops yet edit controls, richedit, and other programs etc don’t understand the hDrop format.
The clipboard could return filenames from an hDrop if cf_text is requested. Or Explorer could copy as hDrop as a preferred format and cf_text as another format.
As I recall, we tried putting both text and hdrop on the clipboard, with hdrop preferred, but it didn’t work due to (you guessed it) app compat issues.
Was that in 1995? May it have changed now that no 16 bit program can run?
One thing I’ve noticed the clipboard features such as automatic conversion are stuck in stone. Nothing new such as html is auto converted to text.
No, things haven’t changed, which is why Firefox still has separate “Copy Image” and “Copy Image Location” context menuitems…
But those are two different functions… One copies the image as an image, the other copies the link to the image! They should be different!
With respect to SendTo, I find it useful to add other items to the shell:sendto folder. Each selected item is a separate command line argument.
Send-to Bluetooth Device I regard as a godsend compared to whatever other methods there might be for setting up a Bluetooth file transfer (I’m sure there are others, I just haven’t expended the effort to find them yet). Slow as molasses in January compared to just hooking up my phone directly, but 99% of the time I don’t have the cable with me when I’m doing this, so there’s that.
As for this approach, it seems only useful for keeping the explorer window in the source directory while facilitating the file move/copy. Otherwise I tend to just use keyboard shortcuts (ctrl/shift-selection, or ctrl-a, ctrl-shift-f for new folder, ctrl-v obviously) and manual navigation to the destination directory, mostly out of ingrained habit.
Does “Send to > Compressed (zip) folder” still bug out if dotdirs are present?