Create Html Lists Of Files And Folders

Whether you need to do so for yourself or for someone else, there is sometimes a need to create a listing of the contents of a particular directory, set of directories, or a whole drive. With the size of hard drives today reaching multiple Terabytes, keeping track of all the stored files would be quite useful. It’s quite easy to find out what files are taking up the most drive space but it’s also handy to know what files are stored where.

There are very simple ways of getting a list of files in a folder without external software. One option is using the Windows command “Dir [folder] > File.txt” from the Command Prompt. However, messing around with console commands is not to everyone’s liking and Dir is also quite limited. Here’s a selection of 10 free tools to save or print out content lists of the files inside your folders including to plain text file, an Excel spreadsheet, or an HTML document. All tools were tested in Windows 10 and 7.

1. FileListCreator

What makes FileListCreator a potentially very useful program is the number of available options in specific areas. It has several different file formats you can save to, including text file, HTML page, comma separated value file (CSV), Excel spreadsheet, and even image files (PNG, JPG, or BMP). FileListCreator has a portable version, is multi-platform, and free to use (donations are welcomed by the author).

You can add multiple files and folders from different directories or drives by simply using the buttons or dropping them onto the window. The lower pane in the interface is a live preview of the output format which you can copy to the clipboard or save. There’s a huge amount of columns you can add to the list including specific columns for images, audio files, video files, text files, documents, attributes, and checksums. Limited output format options such as fonts and colors are found in the Settings.

Download FileListCreator

HTML file names should end in the suffix '.html' or '.htm'. Whichever suffix you decide to use. Snap2HTML takes a 'snapshot' of folder structures on your harddrive and saves as HTML files. What's unique about Snap2HTML is that the HTML file uses modern techniques to make it feel more like a 'real' application, similar to Windows Explorer, displaying a treeview with folders that you can click to view the files contained within (see example output). Creating a folder in a list is similar to creating SharePoint libraries. Unlike for libraries, you can not create a folder until the SharePoint list owner or a user with design permissions enable the default settings. To enable folder creation, go to List settings Advanced settings Folders, and select Yes OK. List all file names from a folder into worksheet by using a web browser. If you want to list files in a folder by using the web browser, you should make sure you have one of the web browsers (Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome) installed in your computer. Supposing you need to list files of following folder in worksheet, see screenshot: 1.

2. Snap2HTML

Snap2HTML is a portable tool that is able to generate a single HTML file that lists all folders and files from a predefined root folder. It’s the one tool in this list we actually use ourselves to make content lists of external drives. What makes Snap2HTML so useful is it creates the most functional and visually appealing HTML file from any tool we’ve seen. It’s very easy to navigate through the list of files and folders in your browser.

The configuration options are few with tick boxes to include hidden or system files. The Link files option turns file entries into clickable links so you can execute a file directly from the HTML page. Drives or folders are searched recursively. The HTML page looks and behaves a lot like Windows Explorer complete with an expandable tree view down the left and a search option. You can edit the template.html file yourself if you know some CSS. Snap2HTML has command line options for use with Command Prompt and batch files.

Download Snap2HTML

3. DirLister v2

DirLister is a tool that we have talked about before. The original from back in 2005 is available on the developer’s website which doesn’t have a .NET 4.6 requirement. The newer version 2 currently in beta is portable and more feature rich than the old version. One improvement is the ability to add multiple drives or folders to the list at once. Use the “Select folder” button or simply drop a folder onto the window.

In addition to HTML and plain text files, you have the option to save as a CSV file, an XML file, a JSON file, or a markdown file. Multiple output formats can be selected at once. There’s also a filter where you can add normal wildcards (like *.jpg) or Regex if you know how to use it. Optional Explorer integration makes it easy to create a file list from the right click context menu. The HTML page DirLister v2 creates is good and probably only second to Snap2HTML.

Download DirLister v2

4. Arclab Dir2HTML

Dir2HTML is a tool that used to be freeware but Arclab took the program full shareware back in 2013/2014. However, we found the last freeware version from 2011 and look at that here as it still works fine in Windows 10. While it might not have as many features as the latest paid version, the old free version of Dir2HTML has a number of useful options to aid in the creation and customization of the HTML index file.

It supports recursive folder indexing, a simple file mask, creating a sub-section for each subfolder, excluding hidden files and folders, including size and date, and many other options. The right side of the window allows you to tailor the output HTML file visually and you can add a customized title, alter the font sizes, colors, and resize different areas of the output. Many of the options can be left alone if the standard layout is acceptable.

Download Arclab Dir2HTML

5. Karen’s Directory Printer

Directory Printer has been a popular tool for several years for printing and saving file and folder lists. This is because there’s a lot of options you can configure to get the output to your liking. Files have 15 pieces of information that can be displayed including names, dates, sizes, attributes, and checksums. Also included is a file mask filter that already has five format presets built-in for images, music, documents, etc.

There are various save options for hidden and system files, sorting, and what to include/exclude. The separate Print and “Save to Disk” tabs have a few different options to allow you to set different output formatting. There’s a right click context menu function in the Settings tab. Sadly, the only truly useful output file format is a text file. You can extract the setup installer with 7-Zip to create a portable program.

Download Karen’s Directory Printer

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You might also like:

2 Tools to List Files Protected by System File Checker (SFC)10 Free Ways to Download All Files From a Folder on a Website or FTP5 Tools To Extract Icons from EXE files and Save As Images5 Tools to Delete or Replace Multiple Lines for All Files in a Folder8 Free Portable File Managers for Quicker File Operations

One more great tool for your list:
folder-sizes-explorer.com/print-files.html

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Brett6 months ago

Any ideas of Android version of this kind of thing?

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I’ve been looking for years. No. No Android app. There should be! The only solution is to use dir2html on a Windows machine and connect it to the phone or tablet.

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VTK8 months ago

Is there a program that includes all possible fields? Length for example?

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The Dir List and Print (#4 in the list above) prints a lot of fields in the free version, with a more complete list of properties which are available only in the purchased version

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Luis9 months ago

Directory List & Print is the best but the free version is limited: No filters.
Karen’s is ok but lacks of preview and looks old.
FileListCreator is better and free as well.

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The comments; including your own, say there is supposed to be a utility here called “DriveZ”…
So where is it?

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HAL9000 Author10 months ago

If you look carefully you’ll see some nice black buttons that take you to page 2 where DriveZ is….;)

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KRK’s DirLister (2.37) free edition only allows HTML saves.

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Edward Dekkers1 year ago

“Dir2Html is a tool which is free for personal and commercial use”

How? When I use it it changes every second entry to “TEST-VERSION” unless I pay.

How is that free???

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Because when the article was written, Dir2HTML was freeware, you can even see the title bar in the screenshot say “freeware”. Arclab have since taken the program full shareware.

I’ve tracked down the last freeware version and we now link to that instead.

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Jim3 weeks ago

Use the older version here — Do NOT update. J

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DriveZ is so simple and exactly what I was looking for. You don’t need to edit the output again to, say, delete the extensions, file sizes or information etc..

Create Html List Of Files In Folder

Only the filenames and it’s directly on the clipboard. Just ready to use in one click. Just have a try if you’re looking for such a simple thing..

(Others are not bad too (JR DirPrinter, Dirlister) but you need to clean information etc.. when compared)

Important: When I downloaded DriveZ using the link here, it asked for password for the zip file and it was looking a bit suspicious (v. 1044). So I searched and downloaded from somewhere else (v. 1.0.19)

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HAL9000 Author1 year ago

The DriveZ download is hosted on our own server. We have to password selected files like DriveZ because they produce false positive alerts in some antivirus software and online services like Virustotal. If we don’t do that, just a few files can cause our entire server to be marked by an antivirus vendor as unsafe or malicious.

If you upload your 1.0.19 file to Virustotal, you’ll see that it is classed as malicious by at least one AV service.

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Thank you.

Create Html Lists Of Files And Folders

So what’s the password for the downloaded zip files? ( I’d tried blank (enter) but didn’t work.. )

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HAL9000 Author1 year ago

The password is listed on the download page.

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Karen’s Directory Printer let’s you save output as a tsv file (tab separated values) which can be read by Excel

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Carl2 years ago

I have always like Directory Lister v0.9.1 by krksoft.com. There are portable versions online BTW. It looks like there is a newer paid/shareware version but v0.9.1 as of 2006 works fine on Windows 7 however I have not tried any newer version of windows.

Make list of files in folder

It has all the options I need to configure the output and the output can be previewed, modified, previewed and saved or copied to clipboard in text, html or csv formats. It does everything I require, nothing more or less.

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I’m using YourDir, which doesn’t have so many fancy options like the above, but is really easy and saves to either CSV or creates an image file, which I’m using a lot.

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xaris3 years ago

There is another way, open elevated cmd and give the command dir > filelist.txt
Open the file filelist.txt with notepad and print it :D

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You can use and dir/s > filelist.txt command also :)

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MikeG3 years ago

And you can open the file in word when you are done :)

Thanks for the refresher… I miss the DOS days…

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Will any of these suggestions work with Win 10?

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Achitophel3 years ago

Create Html File In Word

Directory List and Print is the only one for me. THE single clincher is its ability to output to Word. I’ve used it to produce lists, tables of contents, indices of hundreds of separate music, image, video files and folders which would have taken years to produce manually and which can be printed. And once in Word, editing is easy – using find and replace to produce a style uniformity. It makes the rest look amateur.

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Thanks for the helpful reviews. @ A King: Nobody is interested in your self-serving propaganda. A PC user has the right to control their own machine, including software made freely available for it,

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Alex3 years ago

Snap2HTML is the BEST! It does exactly what I was looking for and I spent quite a bit of time searching! So happy I found it!

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Dir2Html is no longer free. :(

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randomperson4 years ago

I agree with anyone who says that Snap2HTML is the best! the most important thing about it is that it’s FREE so you don’t have to waste your time for finding a working keygen or patch unlike Dir2HTML(spent 1 hour trying to find a working keygen but nothing) and it has a file explorer alike GUI so you won’t get lost easily while navigating huge database

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Stealing software is a crime

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Crantor3 years ago

So informative ¬¬

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This was e-learning for me. Learnt something new

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Rodrigo4 years ago

I’ve tested all of them and the Snap2HTML was the best for me. Its design is exactly what I was needing.
The DIR2HTML and ArcLab are good options too but for what I needed, the Snap2HTML is the first one.

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DirLister works in a test install, but unlike stated in Raymond’s mini-review (thank you) I was unable to get a listing that included folder names without an unwanted recursive listing. Maybe folder names do list with recursion, but I didn’t have time to try that, and it still wouldn’t help me. Also file sizes is one of several future features not implemented after years of version 1.0, but the author said he would have to need these features before implementing them.

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JRC Sarma4 years ago

I have used SNAP2HTML.
It is indeed a great tool and creates HTML file of the directory in a whisker and handy for the web designers. It has built-in option to search the directory too.
I used it for creating a directory containing nearly 4 TB of Files in thousands of sub-directories. It is simply an awesome tool with clean interface and easy to use.
Special thanks to the Mr. Dan, the developer of SNAP2HTML.

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Great app,

thanks to the Mr. Dan, the developer and you too,

and this article. <3

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Gabriel5 years ago

The one I’ve been using for years is Rep-Listing 3.0 (Jean-Pierre Aigron, 2004) ; apart from a few minor bugs and quirks (incorrect file sizes above 2GB, annoying question asked every time the program is opened about « margins set outside the printable area ») it’s complete, fast and efficient. The listings are clear and include the file sizes in bytes written as continuous numbers (i.e. with no spaces, for instance a VOB file will be : 1073709056), which was the feature I was looking for back then. I wanted to have a list of the contents for each one of my hundreds of archived CD/DVDs, with the accurate file sizes, so that I could quickly verify if a file I was about to download was already there somewhere, only by typing its size in Windows XP’s search panel (dearly missed on later iterations), searching inside the directory containing all the listings for a given category of content (then if I wanted to be sure I could take the corresponding disc from the pile and look at the file, or calculate its CRC). Now I no longer archive files on CD/DVDs (neither reliable nor practical) but it’s still useful to keep tracks of things.

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Thanks a ton man………….it works like anything…..great work

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Spyros Hytiris6 years ago

Thank you so much!

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The best one is missing :

mythicsoft.com/agentransack/Page.aspx?page=download

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carlo8 years ago

finally… free from DOS’ dir command, excellent tools!

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Brilliant!!.. Just what Ive been looking for, Thanks!

Create Html Lists Of Files And FoldersReply
Dhruva11 years ago
Create Html Lists Of Files And Folders

Thaks a ton man………….it works like anything…..great work……………

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nice tools this is great! thanks Raymond.

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These tips are intended to save you time as you create and edit your Web pages.

Create Html Lists Of Files And Folders In Excel

  1. HTML file names should end in the suffix '.html' or '.htm'. Whichever suffix you decide to use, please talk to your team members and use the same suffix on all your project html pages. Otherwise it is hard to remember which is which and your project will likely have more broken links in it. Example:
    myhomepage.html

    In addition, use a consistent and standard suffix on other file formats indicating the format (.jpg, .gif, .wav, . . .).

  2. The file name should be no more than 32 characters, including the '.html' or '.htm' file suffix. Because your filename will become part of your Web page's URL, it is better to use a slightly longer file name that will have an easier URL to remember than a jumble of unpronounceable letters. For example: Which of these would be easier to remember and give to a friend as a URL: hurricanes.html or hrrcns.html ? More examples:
    kennedy.html
    shakespeare.htm
  3. The first character of the file name should be a letter.
  4. File names and folder names should contain only letters, digits, and underscores—no spaces, punctuation, or funny characters. We want to really emphasize this because people who do not follow these guidelines end up spending much more time fixing broken links, which can be a source of frustration. This is a 'conservative' guideline with the goal that you should not have to spend extra time redoing your links if you move your files from one type of computer to another. This has been an issue for some past LInC participants when moving or copying their LInC project Web pages from the LInC class Web site to their school Web site.
  5. Whenver possible, make relative links for links from your project Web pages to other Web pages that are in that same project. This will make it possible to move your LInC project Web site to your school Web server without having to fix dozens of links. A relative link to a file in the same folder as the web page you are editing looks like: 'shakespeare.html'. In contrast, an 'absolute' link looks like: '/lincon/projects/essays/shakespeare.shtml'. You can see that if your project was copied onto a different web server, you would have to fix all those absolute links. You will need to use absolute links when linking to Web pages for external resources that are not inside your project folder.
  6. We strongly suggest using all lower case letters because people make fewer mistakes. Web authors (such as yourself) make fewer mistakes when creating links to your pages. Web readers make fewer mistakes when typing in the addresses to access your pages.
  7. Use relatively short names that are indicative of the content of the page. Nothing 'cute' because you probably won't remember it six months from now when you need to edit it.
  8. Also name your files with images, sounds, etc., with names that will help you remember what is in them. Participants who name their images something like picture1.jpg through picture20.jpg are frequently frustrated later because they have to open five or ten files later to find the image they want to edit. If you instead name your images something more descriptive, they will be easier to find later. Examples:
    lightbulb.gif
    book.jpg
    bluebullet.gif
    redline.jpg
    stopsign.gif
  9. Be sure to create a graphics folder (directory) inside the folder (directory) you are using for all your Web pages. It should be titled 'graphics'--all lower case letters. Past participants who did not do this have told us they wish they did because it was harder to keep their files organized with so many pictures in with the Web pages.
  10. Name your anchors in your pages something descriptive. An anchor named '#assessment' is easier to link to and tell others about than an anchor named '#anchor82904872'.

This means that in your file names, folder names, and anchor names there should be:

Are these HTML file names OK? If not, why?

Create Html Lists Of Files And Folders In Outlook

  1. district123_home_page
  2. my homepage.html
  3. linc_home.html
  4. 1_4_all.html
  5. a:b.htm
  6. Joe'sReview.html
  7. earthquakes.HTML
  8. socrates.html
  9. buy/sell.html
  10. 'alpine'skiing.html
  11. exercise#1.html
  12. costs>10bucks.html
  13. editor.htm
  14. rnfrst.htm
  15. image6.JPEG
  16. why_problem_based?.html