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Windows 11 has a bad habit of filling File Explorer’s navigation pane with things I didn’t ask for. Home, Gallery, and OneDrive now sit at the top of the standard pane by default, and they’re just there taking up space every time I open a folder. I went looking for ways to remove them.
Turns out, none of them have a built-in toggle. Windows doesn’t make it easy via Settings or even File Explorer’s own options, so the only path is via the registry. You can run a few targeted edits that hide each of the above sections cleanly, and once you do you’ll have a much more straightforward folder tree with your pinned folders at the top and This PC below it. Here’s how to make that happen.
Home has been in the Windows 11 navigation pane since 2022, and it’s basically a duplicate of Quick Access. It shows the same pinned folders and recent files, just with a different name and a little house icon. If you already use Quick Access, Home is just redundant.
In order to remove Home from your File Explorer pane, you’ll need to hop into the Registry Editor by pressing Win + R, typing regedit, and then hitting Enter.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerDesktopNameSpace and look for the key {f874310e-b6b7-47dc-bc84-b9e6b38f5903}. Right-click this key and choose Delete.
Close the Registry Editor and restart File Explorer with a reboot of your machine or Restart Windows Explorer under Processes in the Task Manager. Once you do that, Home should be gone from the navigation pane, though your pinned folders should remain.
Gallery made its first appearance on Windows in 2023. It does one thing: pulls images from your Pictures folder and OneDrive Camera Roll and shows them altogether in a single scrollable view that’s sorted by date. That could be useful, sure, but it also appears in file picker dialogs, the window that opens when you try to attach a file to an email. It’s not fun to have to scroll past a wall of images just to get to the rest of the folders on your machine, so getting rid of Gallery is the fix.
The trade-off is that if you do use OneDrive Camera Roll sync, Gallery is the only place in File Explorer that shows those images automatically. Removing it means navigating to your OneDrive folder manually to find them.
If you decide to go forward, hit Win + R and type regedit. Press Enter and then navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerDesktopNameSpace. Look for the key {e88865ea-0e1c-4e20-9aa6-edcd0212c87c}, then right-click and delete it. Close the Registry Editor and restart File Explorer as above. Gallery should be gone from both your File Explorer navigation pane and your file picker dialogs.
OneDrive might be the most persistent feature here. It appears at the top of the navigation pane whenever you’re signed in to your Microsoft account and unlike Home and Gallery, it doesn’t stay gone.
The registry path is HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTCLSID{018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6}. Open Registry Editor with Win + R, type regedit, and press Enter. Double-click the system.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree value and set it to 0.
The problem here is that OneDrive always changes this value back to 1 on restart. So you only get a reprieve until you reboot the machine. The only other options to permanently get rid of OneDrive is to unlink your OneDrive account, uninstall OneDrive entirely, or disable it via Group Policy, but only if you’re using Windows 11 Pro.
Now that you’ve done all the above, you should be left with a cleaner navigation pane that reflects how you use your PC, not the way Microsoft wants you to. Your pinned folders should be at the top, with This PC just below it, with nothing else getting in the way. It might be a small change, but it improves File Explorer right away.