Is your hard drive a little messy, cluttered with files which aren’t where you’d like them to be? You’re not alone, and a part of the problem is that Windows really doesn’t make it very easy to clear up. No matter how many times you drag and drop a ZIP file into your Archives folder, say, Explorer never learns that’s where they’re kept, and so you have to move them there manually. Every. Single. Time.

Don’t give up just yet, though – help is at hand in the shape of QuickMove, a simple free tool which aims to speed up your file management. Teach the program where you’d like to keep particular files or file types and you’ll be able to move them all to their destination, in just a couple of clicks.

To get started, just right-click a file you’d like to move (a JPEG image, say), click QuickMove, and a dialog will appear where you can create a new rule. At a minimum, you might choose to move all files with this extension to the Pictures folder, perhaps. Once that’s done, clearing a bunch of JPEGS from your desktop is as easy as selecting them, right-clicking and choosing the QuickMove option – the program will then move them to your specified folder.

Just right-click a file, choose QuickMove, and the program will move it to your preferred folder

Now repeat the process with other file types: ZIP, RAR, ISO, whatever you like. You may not have a general Images folder for ISO files, say, but now you have a tool which can learn these rules it may be worth creating one. And so just having the program available encourages you to get your system organised.

Of course having only one destination folder is probably a little unrealistic, but fortunately the QuickMove developers have realised this. You can alternatively have the program display a list of target folders, then choose the best destination for each batch of files.

And if this doesn’t suit all your file management needs, that’s not a problem. QuickMove is an addition to Explorer’s usual options, not a replacement, so you can carry on manually copying and moving files just as you always have.

There is also a QuickMove Pro edition (yours for $4.99), which has a few advantages, the main one being that you’re able to use regular expressions to define which files match a particular rule. And that adds so much extra flexibility that you may find it worth the relatively small payment (especially as the authors say that’ll get you all future builds, too).

The free edition of QuickMove has more than enough power to be useful, though, and if you’d like to speed up the file moving process then you should definitely give it a try.