Add More Details to Shortcut ToolTip in Windows 10

File shortcuts have been in Windows since Windows 95. A shortcut is a link to another file or folder on your hard drive's file system or to some system object. The object that they link to is called the target. Shortcut files have the extension .LNK but it is always hidden. Today, we will see how to make the tooltip (infotip) of the shortcut show more details.

Shortcut files can be placed anywhere - on your Desktop, pinned to your taskbar or Quick launch if you have enabled it. The most number of shortcuts are located in the Start menu. There, shortcuts are stored in the two Start menu folders, one at %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs, which stores shortcuts unique to each user account and the other at %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs.

When you point towards a shortcut, you get a tooltip (also known as an infotip) showing the comment property. It is not specified,  the tooltip will contain the target location.

The comment and such other related properties are usually stored on the file system or inside the shortcut file (such as the target command line, shortcut hotkey, target type, icon, info on whether to run the shortcut as admin and other information). This is all quite useful information.

Modern versions of Windows have extended the shortcut file format to store more information about apps. Some properties like link target, destination folder and AppID are these extra properties stored by the Explorer shell and shown in places like File Explorer's Details Pane, "content" folder view and on the Details tab of the Shortcut's properties. You can customize these properties as described below.

To add more details to the shortcut tooltip in Windows 10, do the following.

1. Open the Registry Editor app.
2. Go to the following Registry key

   HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.lnk\ShellEx\

   
   See how to go to to a Registry key with one click.

3. Delete the subkey called {00021500-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} under HKCR\.lnk\ShellEx.
4. Then go to the following Registry key:

   HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\lnkfile

   

5. On the right, create the string value "InfoTip". Set it to the following value:

   prop:System.Comment;System.Link.TargetParsingPath;System.AppUserModel.ID;System.ItemFolderPathDisplay

   
   

6. To make the changes done by the Registry tweak take effect, you need to sign out and sign in to your user account.

Every prop: value resolves an individual property, also known as metadata, from the Windows Property System that can be set for files, folders and other files system objects. You can get the full list of prop: values on the following MSDN page:

MSDN:Windows Properties

In our case, we are using the following properties:
System.Comment - a comment defined for the shortcut.
System.Link.TargetParsingPath - the shortcut target.
System.AppUserModel.ID - the AppUserModelID property is used extensively by the taskbar in Windows 7 and later systems to associate processes, files, and windows with a particular application.
System.ItemFolderPathDisplay - the folder path of the shortcut. This is very useful to see the folder containing your shortcut to find if it is located in some all users folder or in a per-user personal folder.

The shortcut tooltip will look as follows:

Another example with the "comment" value:

To save your time, you can download the following ready-to-use Registry files.

Download Registry Files

The undo tweak is included.

Tip: To customize the tooltip value for all files, perform the same editing under

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects

See the following screenshot:

The same can be done in Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.