What is .DS_Store file in windows

07
2014-07
  • Emad

    I found a file with .DS_Store Post fix in one of my drives. How did it get there?

    My Operating System is Windows 7 64-bit and to the best of my knowledge I never accessed an apple computer nor was accessed by one.

    • Answers
  • techie007

    That file is a proprietary Mac/OSX system file that holds attributes/meta-data about the folder it resides in.

    These often appear in file shares that are accessed over the network by a Mac user; but that's not the only way you can get them. You may have gotten it in an archive (ie: a Zip file perhaps) you picked up someplace, which was originally created on a Mac.

    I run into these all the time in archives we get from our graphic designers.

    You're safe to just delete it.

    More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store

    For additional information on preventing them, perhaps check out these SU questions and answers (and others like them):


    • Related Question

    TicTac Photo and Windows 7
  • Questioner

    My wife has been creating a tictac photo album. I had to upgrade to Windows 7 as I had enough of Vista so I backed up the tic tac photo file and the photos to an external hard disk and performed a fresh install of Windows 7.

    Now here is the problem. TicTacPhoto says it can find the photos in the album. The locations were as follows:

    Vista:

    C:\Users\Kelly\Pictures

    Windows 7 

    C:\Users\Kelly\My Pictures

    When I try to create a Pictures folder under Kelly it popups a message about merging the two folders and simply moves the pictures to the My Pictures folder.

    Does anyone know a way to make a folder called pictures so I can eliminate the file path problem and then try again with tic tac photo support to get them to fix my file.

    My wife is going to kill me as its our wedding album and she has spent upwards of 30hrs designing it and me upgrading to Windows 7 means its all my fault. She does not understand file paths etc.

    I'm going to try and open the album file in a text editor and see if I can see anything but thought I would ask here as well.


    • Related Answers
  • Kitruk

    The album is stored in a file with extension '.abm'. It is XML. I myself corrected similar problem by changing the extension to '.txt', and editing the image references. Then changed the extension back to '.abm'. And the album now works fine again.

  • Jeff Martin

    I don't know enough about this particular application (TicTac Photo), but I would look for a file with some non-image extension (maybe .tictac or something). Then I would see if I can open it with notepad. Hopefully it would be an XML file or something that would be easy to update.

    If that doesn't pan out, You should be able to create a folder called Pictures under "Kelly" and then include that in your/her Pictures library.