Have you ever transferred some pictures to your PC and then forget where you stored them? Or, maybe you’ve got a few storage hard drives and don’t want to search them manually? Here’s a simple way to get Windows to search for all your photos on your computer.
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How to Find All Your Photos Manually
Unfortunately, pictures get stored in different places on your PC depending on the where they come from. Windows itself stores images in your “Pictures” folder. Some syncing services try to respect that, but you’ll often find pictures transferred from things like DropBox, iCloud, and OneDrive in their own folders. If you transfer pictures from your camera or another device directly to your PC, those pictures also can end up in different places depending on the transfer method. And if you download pictures from the internet, they’ll usually end up in whatever download folder your browser is set to use.
If you’re feeling adventurous and want to search for your photos manually, the first two places you should look are your “Downloads” and “Pictures” folders, both of which you’ll find in the “Quick Access” section of the pane on the left of a File Explorer window.
A Better Way: Let Windows Search Find All Your Photos
File Explorer has a quick trick for searching for different types of documents. It’s not exactly hidden, but most people never bother with it.
Open up File Explorer and navigate to the location you want to search. You can search your entire PC by selecting the “This PC” entry in File Explorer’s navigation pane.
You can also search a particular hard drive or folder. For this example, we’re going to search our C: drive.
Next, click the search box at the top right of the window. Doing so will display the otherwise hidden “Search” tab at the top. Switch to that tap, click the “Kind” button, and then select “Pictures” from the drop-down menu.
That inserts the following operator into the search box. If you prefer, you can also type it there yourself to get the same results.
As you can see, the results return everything from pictures used by the system to personal pictures contained within the folder and all its subfolders. The search includes images saved in JPG, PNG, GIF, and BMP formats, which are the most common formats used. If you’ve got pictures stored in another format, like RAW, you’ll have to find them another way.
The search I ran on my C: drive came back with 27,494 pictures.
Once you’ve located the picture(s) you were looking for, you can right-click it, then select “Open File Location” to open the folder where it’s contained.
After you’ve located all the photos stored on your computer, you can move them to a more specific folder–like Pictures– or back them up on an external storage device where they hopefully won’t get lost and forgotten again.
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