Short answer: search your whole computer for the file types rather than for names. In Windows, open File Explorer, click This PC, and search *.pes (or your format). On a Mac, open Finder, press Command-F, choose This Mac, and search for the extension. Almost everyone finds several times more designs than they thought they had. Here is the full method, and how to make the hunt unnecessary next time.
Why you cannot find them
It is rarely a tidiness problem. Three things work against you at once.
The names mean nothing. Designs are named by the shop that sold them. PS53-2847 made sense to their catalog and means nothing to you six months later.
You cannot see them. Embroidery files have no thumbnails, so a folder of designs is a wall of identical icons. Here is why that happens.
They are scattered by the way you bought them. Downloads folder, a USB stick, an email attachment, a cloud drive, the old laptop. No single place was ever the place.
So the answer is not to remember where you put something. It is to let the computer find every design at once.
Find every design on a Windows computer
- Open File Explorer.
- Click This PC in the sidebar, so it searches everything rather than one folder.
- Click the search box, top right.
- Type
*.pesand press Enter. Swap in whichever format you use. - Let it finish. On a full drive this takes a few minutes.
- Switch the view to Details, then sort by Date modified to see them grouped by when they arrived.
To catch several formats in one pass, search for *.pes OR *.dst OR *.jef.
Find every design on a Mac
- Open Finder.
- Press Command-F.
- Click This Mac along the top.
- Type your extension, for example
pes. - In the dropdown, choose Name matches rather than contents.
- Add Date modified as a column and sort by it.
The five places designs hide
| Where | Why they end up there | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Downloads | Every purchase lands here first and most never move | Search it before anything else. This is usually the motherlode. |
| Zip files you never opened | Downloaded, meant to get to it, never did | They will not appear in a search for .pes because they are still inside the zip. Search *.zip separately. |
| Email attachments | Shops email smaller purchases | Search your mail for pes, dst or the shop name. |
| USB sticks and SD cards | Copied over to stitch, then left | Plug each one in and search it as a drive. |
| Cloud drives and the old computer | Migrated once, half forgotten | Worth one sweep. This is where the oldest purchases usually are. |
The zip problem
The search above will miss anything still inside a zip file, because as far as your computer is concerned that is one file, not thirty designs. This is where most of the “I know I bought it” purchases turn out to be.
Search separately for *.zip, sort by date, and work through them. Here is how to open one properly, including what the extra files inside are for.
Now that you have found them
You will probably have several hundred files in one list, most of them named unhelpfully, many of them duplicates of the same design in different formats.
Resist the urge to spend a weekend renaming. It works for about three weeks and then new purchases arrive and the system slips. What lasts is being able to see them, because a design you can recognize on sight does not need a good name.
That is the job a library or organizer program does: it reads every design on the computer, draws a picture of each one, and lets you search the lot. Our own Unzip2Stitch does this and reads inside zip files too, so nothing has to be unpacked first. Whatever you use, the principle is the same — stop organizing and start seeing.
Making it not happen again
- One folder for new purchases. Not organized, just one place they all land. Sorting can wait; scattering is the thing that costs you.
- Unpack when you buy. Two minutes then saves the archaeology later.
- Back it up. Once you have everything in one place, that place is worth protecting. Here is how.
- Note where it came from. When you want the matching design eighteen months later, the shop name is what you need and the one thing you will not remember.
Questions people ask
How do I know which format to search for?
Search for the one your machine reads — PES for Brother and Babylock, JEF for Janome, DST for commercial machines, and so on. The full list is here. If you are not sure, search for several at once.
The search is taking forever.
Searching an entire drive takes a few minutes, and longer the first time while the index builds. Start it and go do something else.
I found the same design four times.
Normal. Shops bundle several formats and several sizes together, so one purchase produces a dozen files. Keep them — different sizes are genuinely digitized differently, and the spare formats cost you nothing.
Should I delete duplicates?
Be careful. Two files with the same name in different formats are not duplicates, and neither are two sizes of the same design. If you are not certain, keep both. Storage is cheap; re-buying is not.
Keep reading
Why your embroidery files show as blank icons · How to open a zipped embroidery file · Embroidery file formats explained · The five kinds of embroidery software