Quick fix for very slow to load “Downloads” folder in Windows 7 & 8

I don’t usually post “tips” but this issue has frustrated me to no end for many months and I finally found a simple but instant effective solution. It’s too good not to spread the word about.

In the last couple of months, I started noticing that clicking the “Downloads” folders in Windows Explorer took around 15 seconds to load. This become quite annoying as I frequently access downloaded files from browsers. I tried deleting clearing out the folder but that didn’t have a lasting effect.

After a bit of research, it turns out apparently Windows 7 (and Windows 8) tries to guess-timate what the contents of the folder are and assigns special “rules” to them to optimize the view settings and sorting.

For some reason, the “Downloads” folder likes to be categorized as a “Pictures” folder (I’m guessing because people store a lot of JPGs in it). The problem with this view is that it tries to generate thumbnails for all the files in this folder, even if they’re not pictures.

The fix is to ensure the folder settings for “Downloads” is optimized for “General items”. This should have an instant effect (the next time you add files to the folder since the thumbnails are otherwise cached anyway).

Unfortunately, this change doesn’t seem to always stick as Windows may change the option as you download more files, so you may have to check this setting once in a while.

227 insightful thoughts

  1. Mine was already set to General Items. But I’ve noticed this with a lot of my other folders…Windows wanting to display everything as a picture when I have mostly documents. Nice to know it’s easy enough to fix.

    1. Because they are stupid… Putting down extra work in adding a feature that makes something worse is a high level of stupidity.

      1. Yah! This frustrated me for more than a year, as my Downloads folder gradually slowed down. I assumed it must be something wrong with my PC – even a virus. I didn’t even google “Downloads folder slow to open” because I couldn’t imagine that this would be a common problem – Microsoft are surely not that stupid! It turns out they are!

  2. Thanks. This has been annoying me for a while and I just got fed up enough to do a google search. πŸ™‚

  3. mine was already selected to general, so i just ticked box underneath for changes to affect sub folders now i got instant access not 10 mins of green bar accross the top!
    Thanks

    1. Perfect, like another user here, mine was already set to ‘General’, but ticking the ‘apply to subfolders’ did the trick! Thanks!!!!

  4. OMFG thank you! . What the fuck is wrong with mixrosoft that that would fit this!!!! IT would take 10 min + to load up the fucking folder and my PC is FAR from slow . thanks for making sense of it and stopping it.

  5. not at all working .. mine was not slow… it didnt open .. shows loading for some time then explorer becomes nonresponding….

    1. It begins to sound like you might have a bigger problem than just thumbnail loading issues then. This actually did the trick for me as well. I was about to put my fist through my screen and this did the trick for me. You may in fact just have a corrupted video or image file in the folder and you may have to delete it from the command line if that’s the case. I would also run a malware scan on it just to be sure something else isn’t going on.

  6. Whoops, my Download properties dialog box doesn’t have a Customise tab. The tabs, left to right, are General, Shortcut, Security, and Details. I’m running Windows 8. Any suggestions?

    1. I had the same problem… You have to navigate to the downloads folder through the normal C:\Users\[username] hierarchy, not the dynamic link to ‘downloads’ that shows up when you open an explorer window.

      so I went to…

      C:\Users\Brent

      then right clicked on the ‘downloads’ folder and the ‘Customize’ tab was there.

      And thanks very much for the post! This has been annoying me for years!

      1. ahah! going directly to c:\users\… showed that the box was unchecked, but the quick access downloads folder had it checked… This worked, thanks Brent.

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    Call on toll free number 1-855-569-5945

    1. my inbox opened but my inbox contents is not displayed. some times its displayed half content with one line message. i cant read full content in my inbox.what reason i dont know sir. pleasse help me sir to solve the problem. i think my inbox contents are slowly occured.

  8. Help – I’m in Vietnam with a Windows 8 with the same problem! Can anyone please tell me the way to reset the downloads in simple W8 language?

  9. I’ve been dealing with a slow downloads folder for years! I didn’t know this fix was so simple! Thanks!

  10. Thanks a lot! It’s been a small frustration, but it’s been months since it was doing this. Thanks for devoting your time to share about this fact, which undoubtedly helped many many people. Also, this log-in-less commenting is awesome.

  11. Thanks brutha , i kept restarting my comp ,doing virus scans, clearing temp and cache memory , even check my index options..

  12. BIG thank you! I used to open Downloads folder, go for a cup of coffee, drink it, go to university, finish a master, doctorate, and return to see if Windows 7 was done.

    Now it is instant!

  13. You absolute legend! Thank you so much! This solved my problem perfectly. Like many other comments here, it’s been driving me nuts for months.

  14. Damn it, thank you a lot for your tips sharing ! I’m begining to be crazy with my download folder which loading really slowly. I think it was indexing problems ^^

  15. I don’t have the “Customize” tab in my Downloads folder’s Properties, running Windows 8.1. Any idea how to fix slow folder load time under Windows 8.1?

  16. It will probably come back once in a while as Windows keeps trying to reorganize your folder(s). Had the same problem and found this on another site discussing this problem:

    12/27/13 10:39am

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    This will disable the feature once and for all:

    Regedit.exe

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell

    New -> String Value “FolderType ” -> Data “NotSpecified “

  17. thanks Long Zheng you’re a STAR! My ‘Download’ folder’s load time was pissing me off too… as I say you’re a star (and thanks for doing the homework for all of us!)

  18. Awesome thanks for this! It got to the point where I couldn’t even open the Downloads folder and it crashed explorer.exe!!!

  19. Thank you! You spend a lot of time, research, and money buying the right set up for your pc, and then you’re excited to listen to the song or tv show you bought – only to be stopped by opening that god damn, slow ass download folder. Thank you good sir! πŸ˜€

  20. Not only was mine slow but it wouldn’t even show the contents of whats inside. I must have searched 15 things on Google and all of them failed but finally this worked!!!

    Thank you so much!

  21. I had a folder containing videos that was supposed to be optimized for Videos. Indexing was taking forever so I changed it to General. This seemed to clear it up.

  22. Thank you! This has been bothering me for months, too! So smart of you to figure this out and post for us! πŸ™‚ Can’t quite say the same for MS…

  23. THANK YOU so much.. This was one of the worst annoyances on my computer and now I finally got the idea to just google the issue.. I woudn’t have figured that this was so easily fixable.

  24. windows 8, my porn video folder get a LONG WAIT for progress bar, longer it wait, when the folder contain whole gay web site porn (lots of video), apply this technique does help but … when file explorer, choose VIEW TAB, then extra large icon, then the progress bar appear again and take very long — should delete lot of porn

  25. Thanks! My Pictures folder is redirected to a share on my file server, however whenever I opened it Windows would load the same set of ~50% of them and about four seconds later the others, which was driving me crazy.

    After changing it to “General Items”, my Pictures folder loads all files and thumbnails instantly.

  26. If I could only try this…but whenever I right click on any folder I get the spinning BCOD=Blue Circle Of Death. I can’t organize or move my documents around the way I would like. This is terrible. And I can’t seem to get into Downloads at all. Once again, I’ll have to go into cmd and copy my files from there, because the Windows UI is just about useless.

  27. omg now my utorrent folder is instantaneous YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS

    i’ve known about this options since a long time ago, but never thought it could cause this trouble…

    today i decided to google search it just in case, and BAM!

    LOVE YAAA.

  28. Here it id the END OF 2015 and I’m on WINDOWS FREAKING 10 and they still haven’t fixed this issue. How can a $300B+ company get away with this and stay in business? It’s past sad, it’s insulting.

  29. Thank you so much. i was thinking that my files got corrupted that’s why it is taking that much of time and i had planed to format my drive too. but this solution really works man. (y)

  30. I had the same problem, but changing the content type didn’t help.
    Until I unchecked the shortcut setting “General-Advanced-Allow this file have contents indexed”.
    Now it’s lighning fast!

  31. Thank you very much! My incoming folder (from eMule) was really slow to load, and with your tip now it loads instantly!

  32. Great to have this solved this after same experiences for best part of a year with several pcs!
    Also Picture folder become “unusable” with the feature for it
    It is simply not sensible to find a picture among thousands looking through every tiny thumbnail !

    Also, tick the box below the key one: apply to all sub folders

  33. The time required to open the downloads folder was one of several annoyances after ‘upgrading’ from Win7 to Win10. It finally bugged me enough to Google it.

    Great job! Works beautifully.

  34. Thanks. That’s AWESOME!! Honestly, the I-feel-like-dancing type of AWESOME!! That was driving me almost literally crazy.

  35. Thanks man for this solution. I also found after reading this and looking that whole drives were set to be used as picture storage so if you have a drive that takes forever to load when you click on it that is the problem.

  36. Thanks for the tip. After upgrading my Windows 7 machine to Windows 10 this started happening to me. So the problem is in Windows 10 as well.

  37. 3 years, 5 months, and 8 days, this thread is still helping people out. Thank you so much. Was driving me crazy. BTW using windows 10

  38. Why don’t I have the customize tab in my download properties? I have general, shortcut, security, details and previous versions. I’d love to try this as I’m going nuts waiting for the green bar to finish loading!
    Any ideas??

  39. I can’t find the setting on Windows 7, and I’m the “computer guy” in this family… also seems no one asked it here? 😐

    1. Okay, so I find out… neither clicking ‘Folder options’ or right-clicking –> ‘Options’ takes you to the right thing… right-clicking in empty space in the folder itself required. Really horrible UI. Great work, MS!

  40. Worked for Win 10. I must be a masochist for the years I’ve been enduring the slow sort problem in the download directory. While waiting for it sort I did a search and surprisingly found this post. Immediately solved the problem.

  41. Thank you, 4 years later Microsoft still has not sorted this out, for shame!

  42. Is there another way to achieve this possibly? I’m running Windows 10 64bit on my Surface Pro 3 and initially this method of changing the folder properties to General Items worked, but only for a few days. Every time I access my downloads folder it needs to load and takes up to a minute sometimes (and it’s not like I have gigs of stuff in there). It’s really dumb that Windows needs to load locally saved items, and can be quite irritating at times.

  43. I have these tabs – General – Shortcut – Security – Details – Previous versions (only) There is no other tab.
    Wtf, why were there versions on Win 7 within versions. FFS I hate Microsnuff SO FUCKING MUCH.
    How are they even still in business, considering they ruin entire companies with their piffle?

  44. It’s been 4 years, yet this solution still works like charm for windows 10.

    Thank you very much!. I was thinking my SSD is broken, turns out it is a very simple (yet so frustating) problem with the folder config.

  45. Thank u so much it works really good, this issue keeps frustrating me for the past 1 year but now it really works good.

  46. Thank you so much!!! Just worked on Windows 10!!! Please update the page that it works with Windows 10.

  47. I’ve struggled with this for years over several operating systems. I wish I’d googled it before! Why on earth didn’t they fix it in Windows 10? Anyway well done & thanks for the amazing tip!

  48. Note: my folder was already set to General, but it appears that Windows is lying. If yours is set to General, change it to another value, then set it back. Doing this resolved my speed issue.

  49. I don’t know who you are, or what you write about. But I found this post in a Google result, and I can only say that I LOVE YOU!! Thank you very much!

  50. Didn’t work for me. After messing for this for twenty minutes I finally found a solution that I think worked. Why? Because Windows and Microsoft sucks I guess. Seriously after A DECADE we are still dealing with slow indexing and crap like this. So annoying.

    Open a command prompt and remove the READ ONLY attribute on the Downloads folder. For some reason this fixed this stupid bug.

    1.) Windows+R, type cmd and to drop to a command prompt.
    2.) You should be in your user home directory so type:
    attrib -r Downloads (type the enter key, not ‘<', 'e', 'n', etc.)

    That's it!

    Stupidity fixed!

  51. Like all the others above, this was driving me crazy!!!..infinity.

    THANKS A MILLION FOR THIS!

    To Microsoft’s ‘helpful’ engineers – grrrrrrrr!!!!

  52. I think I figured out how to make this fix permanent.

    Create a new folder on your desktop.

    Drag all of the files in your “Download” folder to the new folder on your desktop.

    Then delete the “Downloads” folder.

    Then rename the folder on your desktop “Downloads”.

    Then drag and drop the new “Downloads” folder to where the old “downloads” folder was.

    Thats it. Your Done. The new “downloads” folder shouldn’t have any presets as to whats in the folder, or whats being downloaded into the folder.

  53. Does NOT work for me. It’s already optimized for “general”.

    How about when Downloads isn’t “15 seconds” slow, but takes 15 MINUTES or more to load? I recently reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows (7 professional 64bit). Worked great for a couple weeks. Now suddenly Downloads loads so slowly it’s useless.

    Anyone have any suggestions?

  54. This was driving me crazy in Windows 10. At least 15s to open. Now it opens immediately. Thanks!

  55. People, clean out your downloads folder and file things where they should go. I had same problem as everyone here. Turns out I had a movie file with a problem, and it was hanging up the folder sorting. I filed all my media into their proper folders and voila, my downloads folder works fine. Get it? The downloads folder is for TEMPORARY storage! File your stuff and this problem goes away!

  56. OMG you saved 83715194716 seconds of my life. All these years I was trying to fix it but never thought that this can fix it. I LOVE YOU! Thank you

  57. I thought my slow loading Download tab is due to Malware (as my laptop has recently infected by cryptolocker ransomware, lost all my movies and my documents). But this trick really saved me, thanks to the thread creator. I’m running Windows 10.

  58. Thanks a ton for this tip! I’ve never had this happen in WIN10 until just recently and I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. Very thankful you shared this.

  59. Oh this!

    Microsoft even brought this “feature” into Windows 10. What a company!

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