My documents folder "too full" of games

[Ghost_Ship_Supreme]

Ordinarily this wouldn't be a problem, But i'm working with documents so much now these days, I want my windows "Documents" directory back, but it's full of files from all my games that are now mixing with my documents. I'd move them to the "My Games" Directory, but that'd almost certainly break them all from being found properly. Especially since many games probably don't check anywhere but the documents directory for save files?

What's the best solution? Since MANY apps like Microsoft 365's suite of apps defaults to saving to this directory, should I just make a new directory like "Documents 2" or something and store them there (and somehow set that as a default for the system/apps)?

Frankly, storing dozens of folders of documents on my desktop is starting to make it cluttered, and it'd be nice to have a directory that i can search through fast, especially since the desktop directory has so many other things besides documents too... Has anyone else had this idea or problem, and what were your solutions?

[Boblin the Goblin]

It depends on the game. Some games look for the same folder and others make their own.

There really isn't a way to merge it because it's programmed into the game where to look and almost never able to be modified by the user.

[Kargor]

AFAICS, it should be possible to just hide the folders you don't want to see in your Documents: hiding doesn't change the name, so games should still be able access it like always, but you shouldn't be seeing them anymore.

Changing the system default probably won't help you at all, since games are probably using the Documents folder as indicated by the system...

[Boblin the Goblin]

引用自 Kargor：

AFAICS, it should be possible to just hide the folders you don't want to see in your Documents: hiding doesn't change the name, so games should still be able access it like always, but you shouldn't be seeing them anymore.

Changing the system default probably won't help you at all, since games are probably using the Documents folder as indicated by the system...

Correct. The game searches for what the system is using for the various locations for saves and such.

So he maybe could change what folder is the system default for 'Documents" but that would change it for everything that uses that folder as well.

[Crazy Tiger]

I've always made my own dedicated folder for documents, I don't use the Microsoft one. As far as I know you can change which folder is the default save folder in, for example, Office 365.

[Large Tomatoes]

Yeah this is a throw back to days gone. Games and applications that store files in the Documents folder are doing so because they are lazy to add the extra code to store them in the proper location, The Documents folder offers several shortcuts for the developer, most importantly it is all but guaranteed to be writable in the current application scope.

This isnt a Windows problem as some people suggest *cough* vegans of the computing world *cough* it is very much a problem with the developer.

A lot of apps are starting to use the home directory now, like Linux, but Windows doesn;t have the same helpful auto-hide-if-a-dot-file functionality.

As others have said, you can either manually hide the top level folder or just use a different one.