File management done wrong — Part 1: From the 90s
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Hi, I’m Gregory, file manager user for almost 25 years, and I got to say something about it — today’s file management is done wrong. I’ll try to point out problems in most widespread software and services and to provide solutions, so if you want, consider this article as a whitepaper.
Look at this screenshot and think what have really changed in last 20 years.
Major intro statements:
- Today file management is seamless on desktop, mobile and web — private, public and collaborative. File manager done right should erase edges between platforms, making files from all sources synced and ready for collaboration and easy sharing.
- It should provide informative preview for all types of content, relevant metadata and view controls on all platforms.
- It should have relevant file action controls to provide ability to do simple things easily and hard things without mindfuck.
Mainstream file managers can’t do that, actually they suck at all 3 points! This is why:
1. Designers don’t really care what they design and don’t use the product. They just do their job.
2. Their bosses don’t care about the design. Should they?
3. Mainstream users don’t notice “minor” flaws. They simply use.
When people ask me what I’m up to, I say “problems of file management”, most of them don’t understand what I’m talking about, others say “is there a problem?”
I want to show how file managers eat my time, share my pain. When I try to find something. Wait for the previews. Wait for search results. Look for right photos. Merge two directories. Share a folder. Wait for a link. Collaborate. Enter a really-fucking-long Google Drive link. Use file manager, image viewer, cloud storage service and a publishing service to do a simple task!
1st part may be a bit boring, but it got to be started somewhere. There will be tons of screenshots. And a lot of hatred. Proceed at your own risk.
Representation
The foundation of file manager is representation of files and folders—graphic preview of content, embedded covers or icons and relevant metadata — it should provide easy visual search for all file types on all platforms.
Desktop and web
Let’s start from the beginning and pick the most widespread solution — Windows File Explorer.
Wait, is this really number 1 file manager in the world? It looks like Explorer from the 90s!
Previews are really small while there is much empty space. It respects image aspect ratio, but it’s not really useful because of size, and there is no metadata.
As a photographer I should state that file manager must respect image aspect ratio.
Then goes Google Drive — folders here look stupid and not informative at all, and no respect for image aspect ratio.
Let’s look at Google Sheets — it isn’t strictly a file manager, but still a good example — there are good previews and relevant metadata.
Another good example — Google Photos — respect image aspect ratio and make previews the right way. Why I’m using this example? Because huge part of files users are dealing with are images.
Yandex.Disk just copy old Windows Explorer. Why they do this? I think they are just helpless — can’t do anything by themselves.
Considering all the flaws, I designed my own concept — Unfolder. I lost alphabet order and PDF preview, but I don’t want to waste my life fixing this things, hope you will get the point, really.
List view
There is no length nor file size shown in File Explorer’s list view in audio folders by default. Very useful, thanks.
Photo folders—I got nothing to say, thanks again, guys from Microsoft, I hope you wanted to do the best, but I think you forgot to try it. See my version.
Google Drive have some list view issues related to high resolutions, so it can’t be properly shown here.
Mobile
Let’s proceed to mobile. Google Drive has 2 versions — list and tiles — both looks OK, but with strange folders and no respect for image aspect ratio again. And there is no zoom to manually select relevant density of content, so you can’t easily find need 10 files from 256.
Yandex.Disk looks OK too, but has same problems as Google Drive.
Google Photos are great again, they provide zoom and metadata. Old Sony Album app was good too, BTW.
I drew my own version again — Unfolder for mobile — now made from goat gibs, with zoom levels and list view, so you can find anything much faster. I don’t want to draw a strict grid of photos, look up and just imagine it, please.
Standalone client / Virtual disk
Yandex.Disk made some interesting thing — download-on-demand client, so you can download files from cloud only when you need them. Why they made standalone client for that? Why not make a virtual disk or something? God knows. I don’t remember other standalone sync apps — not integrated in File Explorer. Maybe it is a great client? No, it’s awful and buggy.
My dad says it is like Norton Commander, totally not like on their landing page.
They just copy old Windows Explorer. Why not make something really good? I think they just can’t (again).
But I think making a virtual disk is a great idea, I first saw this in ZumoDrive (deceased). Today it’s available in Disk-O (made by Mail.ru, so beware).
Alphabet issues
Damn! Just can’t be silent about it, this thing is really annoying. I saw plenty of such issues, don’t really want to dig it. Just some examples:
Many times I saw web developers forgot to make folders first, causing total mess.
Loading and preloading
File Explorer is not keeping HDD active, so when you try to access a folder, it may take several seconds to spin and show your files. Why not keep HDD active or use cached previews and metadata instead? Dunno.
Loading photo previews in Explorer takes huge amount of time, folders opens really slow. Photo viewers like FastStone do it much faster and without interface freezing.
Search
Search in File Explorer can’t find files. I dunno why. They are there, but search returns nothing. Search is slow, it takes minutes. Search options are hidden properly, so nobody can find them. And it looks like hell.
Search results are messy and when you navigate to a result destination, you can’t use navigation bar as usual, can’t see actual folder path and even can’t simply go back — search will start again!
I want to show an example of good search on desktop, but unfortunately there is no such thing, as for me. I didn’t design my version yet. Google Drive search looks promising.
By the way, just hate when Google and others misuse search field as a search shortcut!!1 (on mobile)
Home Screen
When you open File Explorer, you see something like this:
I have no idea why I should see all this things here. Why there are “Frequent folders”, not “Recent folders”? As for me they are kinda useless. “Recent files” list in my case is also doubtable.
Why not make “This PC” screen more useful? So I made another sketch. Recent folders list is always available on the left and can be pinned.
That’s all for now, but there is much to say about. I hope it will be a monthly blowout of my hatred to file managers and people who make them. Next part will be my favorite — about context menus, file actions and file name conflict resolution — most fucked up thing ever, Masterpiece of Shit — stay tuned!
