A Replacement for the Windows Explorer Copy & Thumbnail Viewing Functions?
A replacement for the Windows Explorer 'copy' funtion? HELL YES!
You may be asking why anyone would want to replace Windows Explorer, it is the actual foundation of the User Interface. Well, the problem is that Windows Explorer is not even close to being stable to do rudimentary tasks such as copying files, which is a vital part of any GUI based OS.
Long gone are the days when files were small. Now we are copying large galleries of digital snapshots and video between our smart phone and our PC, or top our family share and back-up cloud hard drive.
But if Microsoft's Windows Explorer is constantly restarting, we can't even copy 25 or 50 GBs of stuff. Heck, My old Windows Notebook has been upgraded to a hybrid 1 TB internal hard drive and its almost full.
But I don't want to simply backup this drive to the cloud, I want to setup the cloud hard drive to allow my family to copy all their photos, video and documents to it, as well as have it available as a central software archive repository.
But every time I copy stuff over using the provided Windows Explorer user interface, once logged into the network drive window, I select a directory to copy in the source window and drag it to the destination directory on the cloud hard drive only to return a day later to have a dialogue window asking me if I still want to copy a file without all of its properties.
First, this WD My Cloud network hard drive was supposed to be Windows Compatible. I am extremely disappointed that it isn't. When I copy something, I expect it to copy everything, including the properties right down to the creation date and the date the file was last modified. So this is an issue I need to address with Western Digital, for sure.
But the fact remains that the WD My Cloud 3TB ethernet hard drive came with no extra software aside from some added drivers. So I only have Windows to accomplish this task, and yet everytime I click 'Yes' to go ahead and copy a file minus a few properties, Windows Explorer fails and restarts, loosing my place where I was in the copy and not re-initializing and re-instituting the task at hand.
These WD My Cloud hard drives have been out there an awfully long time, now. You would think that this problem would have been solved long, long ago. After all, in order to access your gallery and files through the cloud, it needs to be there. So every one else had to copy their stuff over, too.
Now, I will say that I am a professional web designer. I am also an amatuer photographer, videographer and animator. I do have a large stash of imagery. But I am only copying 25 to 50 GB directories, one at a time. These are not 1/2 TB backups. And the whole idea is to have easy access to the original file in the first place.
So now begins my search for a Windows Explorer replacement, as I cannot simply replace the copy command, it is Windows Explorer itself that is constantly failing and restarting and screwing up my life, wasting all my time. Heck, I've had the drive for a week and haven't been able to get it working with my system, there is no included software, no mention of downloads (though after some research I found a download for backup and a few utils), and the little documentation that there is shows no special software requirements in the first place (Connect both PC and My Cloud directly to router via Ethernet for optimal performance and then copy your data to your My Cloud device).
In my search, I ran across an article which offers extensions for Windows Explorer, including a couple of replacements. I won't list the source article, because most of the crap offered included malware or unwanted programs. Good Lord, you have to be careful these days.
One of the copy utilities that was safe is TeraCopy. It specifically addresses the issue that I am having with speed and where Windows Explorer chokes on copying large amounts of data. Errors can be recovered from, copying paused and resumed. Why isn't this a standard Windows feature? Duh! Microsoft, shame on you.
https://codesector.com/teracopy
I highly recommend it. I went and purchased a license for the pro version right away (about $21 USD at the time).
There are some other options out there, but most of the others require you to replace Windows Explorer, and I just got it to display all image thumbnails correctly (including Photoshop image files) with the Fast Picture Viewer Pro Codec (which I also purchased because it works so well and does exactly what I need).
http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/
With these two utilities I hope I have upgraded Windows Explorer enough so that it is finally useful again. The best thing about these programs is that they aren't bloatware by any stretch of the imagination. And even though Fast Picture Viewer doesn't aid in copying, at least you can find the right Photoshop/Illustrator image file that you want to copy when you are working on more than one.
So for now I will stick with my enhanced version of Windows Explorer. But there are replacements for it, as well. Still, I think these are super oversights by an extremely inattentive and clueless Windows graphic user interface software development team.
It does make me wonder what a Windows Explorer replacement might offer.
UPDATE March 26th, 2015:
I have uninstalled Teracopy because I was still experiencing issues. However, these are all the same issues, which means that the original issue appears to be a network one. So I intend to either reinstall Teracopy or try a Windows Explorer replacement, but I think I have to fix my network issue before I will be able to change the system again. That means that I am now saving up for an AC router. However, the Fast Picture Codec keeps working beautifully and I wouldn't dare uninstall that.
UPDATE March 11th, 2018:
Just grabbed a new system and I set myself up with a lot of the free apps you can select and download through Ninite.com. One of the apps I grabbed was Teracopy and I must say that I have been quite pleased. Although I would not say that it works flawlessly (it has struggled when the system was updating and apparently extremely slow for a few moments), I selected to move a tiny file, twice. So, the second time it followed my repeated command, the file was moved and therefore deleted from the original spot.
Where Teracopy shines, though, is in moving/copying around large video production files, and even large Photoshop layered photography, or complex Illustrator renditions.
Having seen its capabilities now, and as I start to move into the video editing arena with even much larger clips and finished videos, I sure am glad it’s available. I will probably go to the pro version once this new Dell laptop is updated with some expensive parts (NVMe & RAM) and all squared away.
I am adding one of my licensed copies of FastPictureViewer to my new laptop, as well. I just cannot stand it when I only see Photoshop icons as opposed to glorious thumbnails of my work representing the actual work, which helps in hunting down a certain image, ten fold.
You just can’t go wrong with these vital system utilities that fix Windows.
That said, I am still looking for a reliable, dependable and fast file manager over LAN connections. That problem has yet to see a good solution.
