WPF – Prevent file dialog selection from being added to recents

Files opened or saved using WPF’s file dialogs (OpenFileDialog, SaveFileDialog or OpenFolderDialog) are by default added to the Windows Explorer’s recent files list and can also impact the Recommended section of the Start Menu in Windows 11.

To disable this behavior, you can set AddToRecent to false on your dialog before calling the ShowDialog() method. Note: this property has been added part of .NET 8, so in case you don’t have it available, make sure your project is targeting .NET 8 or newer.

And for a very quick example:

var dialog = new OpenFileDialog 
{
    AddToRecent = false
};
 
dialog.ShowDialog();
Code language: C# (cs)

That’s it. Now the files picked by the user using the OpenFileDialog will no longer show in the recent files list or in the start menu.

Note: AddToRecent has a default value of true. So unless you explicitly set it to false, the files picked using the dialogs will show up in the recents.