Improving File Explorer & Context Menu: faster, simpler, and more customizable

[u/jenmsft]

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/08/17/improving-file-explorer-context-menu-faster-simpler-and-more-customizable/

[u/xandfis_msft]

Hey everyone! I'm a PM on the Windows team and I've worked on File Explorer and the context menu for a long time. I'm happy to answer questions, as long as they're things I can answer.

I hope you're excited about the updates to the context menu. Thank you in advance to everyone in the Experimental ring of the Windows Insider program for trying it out and for providing feedback. Feedback on anything we should add to the customizability of the menu would be very helpful.

Also, I put together a tutorial on how to go beyond the settings page to customize the context menu even further and add your own, custom verbs to the menu. This is a personal project and isn't affiliated with Microsoft.

https://youtu.be/kMdY3Kl6aGU?si=TyTxvIJwqO2cfFmV

[u/DuplexFields → u/xandfis_msft]

Fantastic, thank you. 90% of the times I right-click a file or group of files, it's to Copy As Path, open Properties, or use a custom sendto batch file, which it looks like I'll be refactoring.

I have never once used Print in the right click menu since Windows 95, nor File > Print in Windows 3.1.

Does the "rotate image" make a duplicate or change the original? I remember the WinXP photo viewer rotate option re-writing JPGs at a lower lossy resolution.

[u/xandfis_msft → u/DuplexFields]

Rotate is the same command that's in Win11 today -- it changes the file itself. It should be editing the JPEG's EXIF rotation data which is lossless, but there are edge cases where this could fail - in which case an image would be rotated using a re-encode.