Folder & File List

About the folder and file list tool

Getting the names out of a folder is oddly hard. You can see the files right there in the file manager, but selecting them and pressing Ctrl+C copies the files themselves, not their names. The usual answers are a command prompt (dir /b > list.txt), a batch script, or installing something. This tool does it in a web page: pick a folder, get the list, press Copy.

You choose what goes in — folders, files, or both — and whether to walk into subfolders or stay at the top level. The result is plain text you can paste anywhere, or a CSV you can open in Excel.

Your folder is read inside the browser. Nothing is uploaded, and the tool only ever reads — it cannot rename, move or delete anything.

How to use it

• Click Choose a folder and pick the folder you want to list. Your browser will ask you to allow reading it
• Tick what you want — Folders, Files, and Include subfolders for everything underneath
• Pick a format — names, full paths, a tree, CSV, or a Markdown list
• Press Copy to put the list on your clipboard, or Download the list to save it as a file

The three checkboxes

• Folders — include the subfolder names themselves. Turn it off when you only want a file list
• Files — include the files. Turn it off to get a list of subfolders on their own
• Include subfolders — off gives you only what is directly inside the folder you chose; on walks the whole tree, however deep it goes

They combine freely: Folders on, Files off, subfolders on gives you the complete folder structure with no file noise. Folders off, Files on, subfolders off gives you the plain filenames of one folder, nothing else.

Five output formats

• Names only — holiday-01.jpg, one per line. What most people want when they need to paste filenames into a document or a form
• Full paths — 2024/summer/holiday-01.jpg, so you can tell duplicates apart and see where each file sits
• Tree — an indented diagram with ├── and └── branches, the way developers show a project layout in a README
• CSV — name, type, path, and optionally size and date, in columns. Opens straight into Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers
• Markdown list — - filename, ready to paste into a README, a wiki page or a GitHub issue

Tick Show size and Show date to add those to any format. In CSV they become their own columns; elsewhere they are appended in brackets.

Narrow the list down

• Only these types — type jpg, png to list just images, or pdf for just PDFs. Dots are optional and case does not matter. Folders are never filtered out by this
• Sort by — name, path, size (largest first), date (newest first), or file type. Folders are listed before files except when sorting by path, which keeps the tree order intact

What you can use it for

• Pasting a list of filenames into an email, a spreadsheet, or a form
• Making an inventory of a photo, music or document folder before archiving it
• Producing a project tree for a README or a piece of documentation
• Checking what is actually in a backup without opening every folder
• Building a CSV of files with sizes to find what is filling up a drive
• Handing a client or colleague a list of what you delivered

Two ways your browser reads a folder

This matters enough to be honest about, because the two behave differently.

Chrome, Edge and Opera support a proper folder picker. The tool walks the folder itself, so it sees empty subfolders, and when Include subfolders is off it genuinely does not open them. You grant read access to that one folder, and only for as long as the page is open.

Firefox and Safari use the older folder upload control instead. The browser hands over every file in the tree at once, and the folder structure is worked out from the file paths. Two consequences: an empty folder cannot appear in the list, because no file inside it reveals it exists, and the whole tree is read even when you only asked for the top level. Everything else works the same. The tool tells you on screen when it is using this route.

Good to know

• Nothing is uploaded. There is no server involved in reading your folder — you can watch the network tab if you like
• The tool has read-only access. It cannot create, rename, move or delete a single thing
• Hidden and system files appear if your browser exposes them; some folders (like Windows system folders) will be refused by the browser itself
• Very large folders are capped at 200,000 items so the page cannot freeze — you will be told if the list was cut short
• File sizes and dates come from the file system, so they match what your file manager shows
• CSV downloads include a byte-order mark, so accented and non-Latin filenames open correctly in Excel

Related tools

• Sort List — reorder the list you just copied
• Remove Duplicate Lines — clean a list of filenames
• Compare Lists — see what changed between two folder listings
• Column to Comma Separated List — turn the list into one comma-separated line