How to Remove Gallery from Navigation Pane on File Explorer

by Rian

Coming from macOS environment, one of the immediate changes I want to make to File Explorer on Windows would be the items available on the sidebar, or navigation pane. I don’t store photos on a Windows machine; in fact, I have them stored on a NAS, which is running a flavor of Linux. Gallery on File Explorer doesn’t help, especially when it can scramble pictures from different project folders.

Instructions

This is yet another Registry Editor trick.

  1. From Registry Editor, navigate* to the following path:
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace
  1. Remove the key named: {e88865ea-0e1c-4e20-9aa6-edcd0212c87c}
  2. Restart the machine

*Depending on your system language, copy-pasting the path may not work. I have experienced weird glitches where Windows would omit backward slash on Korean systems.

Afterthoughts

It’s bizarre on two points: one. there are no options to do this on GUI, two. Registry Editor does not have a proper name for the key. I believe the feature to remove Gallery from the sidebar would be frequently requested, especially for those of us who would use Windows machine for work purposes only. For home and personal use, Gallery feature may come in handy; yet again, that’s not the only aisle on which Windows is offered. In my opinion, it should be a simple drag-and-drop to remove it.

– How-to / /

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