- [Instructor] Copying and moving items
from one place to another on your storage drive
is key to getting your files organized.
I want to go to my documents folder,
then to this photos folder
where I have a bunch of other folders,
including a few that I made in another video.
This Italy folder and this Switzerland folder
are going to help me get more organized.
So first, Florence belongs in Italy.
So I want to move this folder inside of another.
One easy way to do that is to just drag it.
Place your mouse cursor on that item,
hold your mouse button down,
drag it to the destination and let go, and it's been moved.
Okay, but if we look at these other folders,
a lot of the others also belong in Italy.
So sometimes, you want to select multiple items
at the same time.
Now, what you could do is click to select one item
then hold the Shift key on your keyboard
and click on another, and everything in between is selected,
and you can click outside of that to de-select them.
Another option would be to click to select one,
then hold the Control key on your keyboard.
And as you're holding the Control key,
you can click on another and another and another,
and now, I have multiple items selected
and if I drag one of them, they will all move together.
I can drag them to the destination
and they've all been moved.
And while we're at it, I'm going to go ahead and
do the same thing with all of these folders
that belong in Switzerland.
And now I've got things much more organized.
Next, I want to move all three of these folders
into the standard pictures folder.
That is one of the standard folders
that's inside of your home folder
and it's a better place to put pictures.
Now, up until now, we've had everything all in one window,
but I can't see the contents of my documents folder
and the contents of my pictures folder
in one window at the same time.
But what I can do is use these shortcuts.
So I could grab one of these folders
and I could drag it to the shortcut to my pictures folder.
And it has been moved.
It's no longer in the original location,
but if I go to the pictures folder,
I can see it has been moved there.
Okay, but what if you don't have access to
the shortcut for your destination?
Well, in that case, you might just use two windows.
Now, you can go to any folder or even any shortcut,
right-click on it, and choose Open in New Window.
So now, I have two separate windows
and I'm just going to move them and resize them
so I can see them side by side.
This window shows me the contents of my pictures folder,
and this window shows me the contents of my documents.
And then I can go into that photo sub-folder,
and now it would be very easy to drag something
from one window to the other, and it has been moved.
You can see it's gone from the original location
and it's been moved over here.
Okay, so here's the next thing.
Everything we've done so far has been a move action.
It's gone from the original location
and moved to the new location.
But sometimes, you want a copy
so you've got it in the original location
and in the destination.
So just to reset, let me move those folders back,
and then we can talk about copying them instead.
So one way works very similar to what we just saw.
You can drag something from one window to another,
but I'm still holding my mouse button down.
As I'm dragging, I'm going to hold the Control key
on my keyboard and you'll see, below my mouse cursor,
it will change from move to copy
when I'm holding the Control key.
So I can drag this, I can let go, and it's been copied.
It's here in the destination,
but I still have the original over here
in the original location.
Okay, but let's look at another way to copy something
if you're working in only one single window.
What you can do is select the item,
then go to the toolbar up at the top
and choose this copy option,
or you can use the keyboard shortcut Control C.
That will copy that to the system memory,
then you can navigate over to the destination
and you can paste it by clicking the paste button
in the toolbar or use the keyboard shortcut Control V.
So now I have a copy of that folder here, but it is a copy.
There's still the original copy in the original location.
So those are your core options for copying and moving files.
Of course, there are other ways to do this,
but these are the most common options.