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After the recent update Windows file explorer is now grouping items by day, week and month. I do not want this. I want the old way back please. How do I get rid of this new sorting? I hope this is not going to be like what happened to media folders where they now display metadata columns instead of name, date, size, type and even if you change them the next time you open the folder it has reverted back to metadata columns.
Update: I worked out that Group By must be set to none. How do I make this default so it doesn't revert back? I'd also like to stop my media folders reverting back to the old way too so they show name, date, size, type instead of Artist, Album, Title etc
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There is no bug. Someone at Microsoft just managed to apply their default folder setting to everyone that installs the update.
To turn off file grouping feature:
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There's a tool available now to set Explorer views globally. The settings won't get reverted back unexpectedly because it sets defaults (per user, not per machine). It's called WinSetView. You can find it on GitHub. I'm the developer. See the Readme for full details.
Thank you. That's great news! I was doing my usual unchecking and checking file attributes again today and still cannot believe that more users including Microsoft engineers are not driven demented by this. It never used to be like this before Windows 10. So many times a new version of Windows delivers a number of improvements and then sadly one or two huge steps backwards in some areas.
I hate it when Microsoft does this. After an update they kind of just "shove it down your throat" and you have to figure out a way to get rid of it which can often be time consuming. Sadly it's always a feature that's widely used (Ex: Windows Explorer sorting) that gets modified and people end up losing a bit of productivity in the process.
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The Group By date issue with Downloads is an interesting one. The update from Windows 10 1809 to 190x changed the Downloads folder from a generic folder (GUID {5c4f28b5-f869-4e84-8e60-f11db97c5cc7}) to a unique folder type (GUID {885a186e-a440-4ada-812b-db871b942259}). I haven't seen an official explanation for the change , but maybe it's related to ensuring users are warned of potentially dangerous downloads. The GUID change necessarily caused Explorer to reset the view for Downloads to the new default view for Downloads. For whatever reason, Microsoft (programmers, UI designers) decided to make Group by date the default for the new Downloads folder type. Maybe it didn't occur to them that the view would be reset or maybe they didn't realize how annoying it would be to many users.
