See Any Audio or Video File’s Length Without Opening It

Ever stare at a folder of recordings wondering “is this the 3-minute clip or the hour-long one?” — then double-click just to find out? Show File Length kills that little friction with a single hotkey. Select your files in Explorer, press Ctrl+Shift+L, and a clean little toast pops up next to your mouse with each file’s exact duration.

The Problem It Solves

Windows already knows the duration of your media files — it’s right there in the “Length” column if you switch Explorer to Details view. But who runs Details view all the time? And who wants to right-click → Properties → Details every time they’re triaging a folder of voice memos or screen recordings?

Show File Length skips all of that. One hotkey. Mouse-anchored toast. Done.

What You Get

• Instant duration popup — no clicks, no Properties dialog, no opening the file in a player.
• Multi-file friendly — select 50 files at once, get every length in a single popup, one per line.
• Mouse-anchored toast — appears right where your eyes already are.
• Customizable hotkey — don’t like Ctrl+Shift+L? Pick your own from the built-in Preferences window.
• Explorer-only by design — won’t fight your IDE, browser, or Photoshop for the same key combo.
• Self-diagnosing — if anything goes wrong, a full debug trace is copied to your clipboard automatically.

What the Toast Looks Like

One file selected:

Several files selected:

Durations are trimmed for readability — “00:03:42” becomes 3:42, and an “01:23:45” stays exactly that.

How To Use It

1. Open File Explorer and browse to a folder with audio or video files.
2. Click one file, or hold Ctrl / Shift to select several.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+L.
4. Read the duration toast next to your cursor. That’s it.

Why It’s Built This Way

Show File Length is a scoped hotkey — it only fires when File Explorer is the active window. That’s intentional: a global Ctrl+Shift+L would step on key combos in editors and browsers. By scoping it to ahk_class CabinetWClass, the hotkey is always available exactly where you need it and silent everywhere else.

Under the hood, it asks Windows itself for the same “Length” value Explorer shows in Details view — so anything Explorer can read, Show File Length can show. No external tools, no FFmpeg, no media engine. Just one quick Shell call per file with smart caching when you select a batch from the same folder.

Get It

Grab Show File Length over at the-Automator.com/ShowFileLength and stop double-clicking files just to check how long they are.

A free little tool from the-Automator.com — built in AutoHotkey v2, runs from source or as a compiled .exe.