Take the repetition out of housekeeping chores on a hard disk

To begin, download and install Dropit. Launch a web browser and visit DropIt's download page. When the page loads, scroll down to find and click the latest DropIt Installer link (version 3.7 at the time of writing). If the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click Save and choose a location for the file. Firefox users should select Save File to save the download to Firefox’s default download folder. Now locate and double-click the downloaded file (called ‘DropIt_v3.7_Setup.exe’ or similar) to launch the setup wizard. Click Next and install the software, accepting the licence agreement. At the Additional Tasks screen put a tick next to the Context menu option, then carry on and finish the installation.

Choose your language and after a moment, the Dropit icon will appear on the Windows Desktop – it’s a big blue square with a white arrow. We will begin by setting up a scenario where Dropit would be helpful. Right-click the Desktop and choose New Folder – we’ve called ours ‘October’. We will set up Dropit so as friends email us new photos compressed as zip files, the program will automatically extract them into this folder. Right-click on the Dropit icon and choose Associations from the pop-up menu. When the Manage Associations dialogue box appears, click the New button.

When the New Association dialogue box appears type a descriptive name (ours is ‘Unpack’) and then click in the empty Rules box. Type *.zip – the asterisk works as a wildcard that tells Dropit that the action about to be created should affect only files with the .zip file extension (this is what Windows uses and is the most common form of compressed file). Open the action dropdown menu and choose Extract. Then click on the folder button and select the destination folder (October) created in the previous step. Click OK and click Save.

Click Close to return to the Desktop. Next, open a folder, select some files, right-click on one of them and choose Send to from the pop-up menu and then Compressed (zipped) Folder from the submenu. When Windows has created a single compressed folder from the selection of files, drag that out onto the Desktop. Next, drag it over the Dropit icon and then release the mouse button: Dropit will extract all the files in the compressed folder and pop them into the folder defined by the rule created in the previous step – the October folder.

Let’s make another association and rule. Right-click on the Dropit icon and choose Associations. At the dialogue click New. Give the association a name – for example ‘Copy Pictures’ – click on the Rules box and this time type *.jpg (one of the most common picture formats). Select Copy from the Action dropdown menu and then click the folder icon to choose a destination; we’ve made another new folder called October Photos. Click Save to add the new association. Now, any time we drag a folder with JPG pictures in it over the Dropit icon they’ll automatically be copied into this folder.

What happens if a folder includes more than one file type? Right-click on the Dropit icon and choose Associations. At the next dialogue box, double-click the Copy Pictures association created in the previous step to open the edit window. Click in the Rules box and type a semi-colon. Then add a new picture type after that so the box reads, for example, ‘*.jpg;*.tif’. Click Save and then Close again. Dropit will now copy both JPG and TIF files into the specified folder.

In fact, it’s possible to create different associations and rules for each picture file type. To do this, open the Associations dialogue box again, double-click the Copy Pictures association in the list, delete the ‘;*.tif’ part from the Rules box and click Save. Click New and create a completely new association for TIF picture files (maybe to move them to a different folder); while there, click the Additional Filters button, tick the Size box, type 2 in the box next door and select MB from the dropdown menu. Click OK. Dropit will now move TIF files larger than 2MB into whichever folder you’ve specified.

In addition to setting up associations in the way we’ve done so far, Dropit also supports different ‘profiles’. Profiles can contain different groups of associations and because it’s easy to switch between profiles, this makes Dropit even more powerful. Right-click the Dropit icon and choose Profiles, then Customize. At the dialogue menu, click the New button and give the profile a name. We are going to use it to group various backup and deletion associations, so we have called ours ‘Housekeeping’. Click the Search button and then scroll through the icons to find something suitable – we chose Big_Box2. Select it and click Open.

Back at the New Profile dialogue box, change the icon size from 128x128 to 64x64 (pixels) and click Save. Then click Close. Right-click on the Dropit icon and choose Profile from the pop-up menu and select the profile you just created – in our example it’s called Housekeeping. The icon changes from the default white arrow against a blue background to the icon we chose in the previous step. Now we can right-click on the new icon and choose Associations and create an entirely new set of rules.

Having set up a second profile and added associations to it, we can continue to switch between it and the default one by right-clicking the Dropit icon and selecting Profile. Alternatively, we can use the context (right-click) menu we activated in Step 1. Right-click on the folder you want to work with and choose Sort with Dropit from the pop-up menu. When the Select a Profile dialogue box appears, open the dropdown list and select the profile that contains the associations you want to use and click OK.