


Windows 11 can open big folders in File Explorer faster if you turn off folder discovery
Jul 24, 2025 am 12:02 AM
File Explorer is significantly slower than Windows 10 in Windows 11, and an update in February this year even caused exceptions to some users' file managers. It's not clear when Microsoft will optimize this "modern" file explorer, but turning off automatic folder recognition can bring significant performance gains when opening folders with a large number of files.
Automatic folder recognition is not a new feature in Windows 11. As early as the Windows XP era, Microsoft introduced this feature in Explorer, with the purpose of automatically applying appropriate display templates based on the content type in the folder. For example, when a folder mainly contains pictures or videos, the system attempts to display thumbnails by default.
Therefore, folders of different content may present different view styles, which in some cases does improve the user experience. However, it turns out that disabling this "folder type" automatic recognition feature—that is, preventing the system from scanning every file in an undefined folder—can greatly improve response speed when opening directories containing hundreds or thousands of files.
If there aren't many files in your Downloads or Documents folders, then the benefits you may get from turning off the feature are minimal. But if you want all folders to maintain a unified view style without being affected by content, this setting is well worth adjusting unless you are willing to manually set how each folder is displayed one by one.
How to disable folder automatic recognition in Windows 11
An easy and effective way is to skip the automatic identification process of folder types by creating a new key value in the registry.
The operation steps are as follows:
Enter the registry path:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell
Right-click in the blank area on the right, select New → String Value , and name it FolderType .
As shown in the above figure, set the value of FolderType to NotSpecified .
If you don't want to operate manually, you can also download the corresponding .reg registry file from our Discord server and import it in one click.
Once the setup is complete, File Explorer will no longer spend time scanning each file to determine how it is displayed. This registry modification not only significantly improves the open speed of Explorer, but also keeps the view styles of all folders consistent.
To restore the original state, just delete the "NotSpecified" value of FolderType in the registry.
This problem is particularly obvious on Windows 11, because its own file explorer has a performance bottleneck, and it may feel lag even on high-end hardware.
It is worth mentioning that this registry skill has been widely used in the era of Windows XP, Vista and 7. Recently, users on the X platform mentioned this method again as one of the effective means to improve the response speed of Windows 11 system.
The above is the detailed content of Windows 11 can open big folders in File Explorer faster if you turn off folder discovery. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

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