Windows – How to force Windows to display the seconds in the date modified/created column of Explorer

windows 7windows-explorer

This is primarily for Windows 7, but I work in multiple versions and would happy to be able to do it in as many of them as possible. Currently, when I open Explorer and look at a list of files, the date modified column shows something like:

09/18/2013 10:03

I would like it to display:

09/18/2013 10:03:42

I've tried changing the region and language settings for the short time format from HH:mm to HH:mm:ss, but it says it ignores seconds for that. Does that mean I'm just out of luck? And again, I'd like to be able to do this in any other previous versions of Windows too. It's useful for me as a developer to be able to see the seconds in a lot of situations.

Minor clarification: I did find this question and answer, which helped me to improve the file properties display, but I wanted to be able to view the full timestamp for all the files in a folder at once, instead of individually.

Best Answer

Unfortunately, Microsoft has blocked all possibilities for displaying the seconds.

Windows Explorer now ignores any such specification coming from the system date format, and this is done on the code-level, so any fix will need to directly patch the binary explorer.exe, which is not recommended.

On the other hand, Microsoft has also decided to cancel the possibility for Explorer add-ons to create new columns (link), so even that way is now blocked, or such a solution would have surely existed by now.

There is simply no solution possible when using Windows Explorer, so you need to turn to third-party products, of which there is a large choice available.

See the article Best Free File Manager for a whole list of such alternatives to Explorer, with reviews. There are too many to list here, not only since product recommendations are not allowed on our site, but since choosing one over the others is more a matter of personal preference.

Using a third-party product will also solve the problem for all Windows versions. Even where installation is impossible, quite a number of these products are also available as a portable app that you may carry around with you.

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