As you must have noticed, Microsoft Edge Browser saves downloaded files to its own default location and there is no easy option in Windows 10 to change this default behaviour of Edge browser. In this post you will be learning how to change the default Microsoft Edge download location.
Where Does Edge Save Downloaded Files
Microsoft Edge saves all the downloaded folders to “Downloads” folder under your profile. For example, a user named “George” will have a default download folder located at C:\Users\george\Downloads.
However, this may not be suitable for everyone and you may want to see all your downloaded files and images right on your desktop, instead of being hidden under the default Edge Browser’s location.
Change Microsoft Edge Download Location
Edge browser is not very helpful in this case, it does not provide any way to change the downloads folder in its settings menu, but there is a way out of this annoyance.
Follow the steps below to change the default Edge Browser location for downloaded files to your very own specified location.
1. Open the registry editor.
Just type “regedit” in the search bar next to the Windows 10 Start menu and press on the suggested search result
Or you can press Windows + R buttons on your keyboard to bring up the RUN command and type in regedit in the box labelled open and hit enter.
2. Locate HKEY_CURRENT_USER and click on the folder
3. Click on Software > Microsoft > Windows
4. Next click on Current Version > Explorer > User Shell Folders
Steps 2, 3, 4 should lead you to the following path:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders.
5. Open the registry key with a Data setting of %USERPROFILE%\Downloads. It will be named something like {374DE290-123F-4565-9164-39C4925E467B}.
6. Change the Value data to %USERPROFILE%\Desktop to save all downloads from Edge browser to your desktop (See image below)
Alternatively you can save all downloads to a special folder say C\mydownloads or any other place that you want to save downloaded files to.
7. Close the registry editor once you have set the desired values.
From now on anything that you download to your computer will be saved to your desktop or to your desired location for downloaded item (in case you have set it that way) and not on the default Edge browser location.