File explorer for Windows that allows to see all files in all subfolders of a folder at a glance

Question

For example, given the file structure:

Folder_1
    Folder_1-1
        File_1-1_1.jpg
        File_1-1_2.jpg
    Folder_1-2
        Folder_1-2-1
            File_1-2-1_1.jpg
        File_1-2_1.jpg

A view would then give me something like this

File_1-1_1.jpg
File_1-1_2.jpg
File_1-2-1_1.jpg
File_1-2_1.jpg

Preferablly, the explorer should also have a prieview pane for jpg, pdf files.

Answer 1

I can recommend Search Everything. It works on Windows, is super fast and free.

It's not exactly a file explorer, though. How would it work? In the menu, activate "Match path", then type the path into the textbox. Done.

It has a preview feature, and I actually didn't know this until now. So I can't judge about that yet.

Answer 2

I can suggest Total Commander. Dual panel file explorer, it has a "Show all files in current directory and all subdirs" option (Ctrl + B) that will show all the files in the current directory and in all its subdirs.

Then you can sort the files, rename, preview, etc.

Answer 3

I don't know, but perhaps look at the Windows Subsystem For Linux. It might support the locate/ updatedb Unix command line tools. updatedb is the pathname indexer, and locate is the query tool.

You can then run simple command like

locate File_1-1_

to find all files containing the substring File_1-1_, and locate would give you the absolute paths, in a terminal window.

The you can do filtering such as

locate File_1-1_ | xargs -i basename "{}" to get only the filenames, just like in your post.

For filtering and previewing images you could do

locate File_1-1_ | grep "jpg\|png" | xargs -i convert -resize 100x "{}" "preview.{}"

This would create a bunch of new thumbnails with filenames such as preview.DSC0012345.jpg, all with 100 px width, in the current directory.

convert is part of the Imagemagick set cof command line tools. So you'd have to install Imagemagick (or graphicsmagick) first.

I am sure Powershell can do something like these commands too.