Organizing 15 years of messy photos & videos — the tool I ended up building

[tiago.trindade]

The app is shaping up very nicely. No operational issues encountered thus far, afaik. (Win-11 v3.6.0)

Thank you! (and for the time you sent testing it release after release )

 

[tiago.trindade]

Really nice software.
Bought the license to be able to handle more than 100 files per operation.
Got it to analyze/sort/move about 6000 files in less than 30 secondes.
Will try more advanced features on my nas to sort all my pictures since 1999 (several hundred thousand of images and videos).

So good to receive this feedback @vicenzo_del_paris ! I am glad it works great and helps us organize all those "lost" photos.

More features on the way

 

[tiago.trindade]

Small update for anyone who followed this thread — FolioSort is now at v4.1.0

When I first posted here it was a fairly simple "organize by EXIF, rename, fix Google Takeout" tool. A lot has happened since, so here's a quick catch-up for anyone still curious.

The headline stuff, all of it running 100% locally — no cloud, no account, nothing leaves your machine:

• Natural-language photo search — type "sunset on a beach" or "my dog in the snow" and it finds them. On-device model, works fully offline.
• Cloud Exit Kit — properly rebuilds real capture dates when you export out of Google Photos and now iCloud (reads the CSV/JSON sidecars most tools ignore).
• Workflows + watched folders — chain organize → de-dupe → rename → cull, or point it at a folder and let it run automatically as new files land.
• Culling helpers — surface your best shots, flag blurry frames, screenshots and near-duplicates.
• Find-a-person — local face grouping, again no cloud.

Rather than dump it all at once, I'll write up a few of these properly over the next few weeks — happy to go into the technical side (which models, how the date recovery works, etc.) since I know this crowd actually cares about that. Feedback from the earlier posts shaped a lot of this, so thanks, and keep it coming.

macOS and Windows: foliosort.app

 

[tiago.trindade]

Follow-up #1: the local natural-language search

Promised I'd go deeper on a few things. Starting with the search, because it's the part people assume must be "sending photos to some AI in the cloud" — it isn't.

It uses an on-device vision model (MobileCLIP-class) that turns every photo into a numeric fingerprint, once, and stores an index locally. When you type "red car in the rain" your text gets turned into the same kind of fingerprint and matched against your library. No uploads, no account, works on a plane.

Practical bits:

• First run indexes the library (one-off); after that search is instant.
• It's genuinely semantic — "celebration" finds birthday cakes and parties, not just files literally named that.
• There's also an optional plain-language mode ("photos from summer 2019 without people in them") if you run a local LLM, but the core search needs nothing external.

Curious whether anyone here has a specific search they'd want to throw at it — happy to test (www.foliosort.app/download).

 

[tiago.trindade]

Follow-up: automatic people grouping — faces sorted without a cloud in sight

The earlier version of this let you point at one photo of someone and pull the rest. The latest build takes it a step further: it now scans the whole library once and automatically groups every face into people on its own — you just put names to the clusters it finds.

How it works, for those who care about the internals:

• Face detection and the face embeddings run entirely on-device (Vision + Core ML on macOS, ONNX on Windows). Nothing is uploaded, no account, no name database phoning home.
• It builds a local index of face "fingerprints" and clusters the ones that match closely enough into a single person. You name a cluster once and the name sticks to those faces.
• When two clusters look like they might be the same person, it doesn't merge silently — it drops them into a "same person?" suggestions queue for you to confirm or reject. Your call, not the algorithm's.
• You can then write those names into the photos' XMP metadata, so other apps (Lightroom, digiKam, Apple/Windows Photos) see the same people. Anyone unnamed just comes through as "Unnamed person 12" rather than being forced on you.

The reason I keep hammering the "local" point: this is exactly the feature most people want but won't use, because it normally means handing your family photos to Google or Apple to do the recognition. Here the whole thing happens on your machine, and the face data lives in a local index you can wipe.

Still a one-time license, existing owners included, full undo. If anyone here has run other on-device face-grouping and has opinions on where it falls short, I'd genuinely like to hear it — it's the feature I most want to get right.

macOS (notarized) + Windows: foliosort.app

 

[EL_PW]

Long-time lurker, here for the audio but I shoot a fair bit too

I wanted to share something I built on my own, because my photo library was a disaster and nothing out there did quite what I wanted over the years.
Sharing in case it's useful to someone here — and honestly, I'd love the feedback of a crowd this fussy.

The mess I had: 15 years of photos across phones, cameras and old drives, thousands of files named IMG_4471.JPG, and a Google Photos Takeout export that's basically a 40,000-file dump with the dates hidden in separate JSON files.

So I made FolioSort. It runs entirely on the machine — no cloud, no account. Three things it does, because those were my three actual problems:

- Sort files by metadata: point it at a folder/drive/SD card and it files everything into a structure I define from EXIF — date, camera, lens, GPS city. e.g. {YYYY}/{MM}/{Camera}/{City}.
- Batch rename: rename thousands of files from EXIF with a live preview before I commit (regex if needed)
- Fix Google Photos Takeout: reads the JSON sidecars, restores the real capture dates and lays it all out properly so I can actually grab my Google Photos photos and put them on a digital frame at the kitchen (running on an iPad)

Handles RAW and cinema RAW, verifies copies with checksums, and has a proper undo — I didn't want to trust a tool that moves my originals without a safety net.

On platforms: the macOS version is notarized by Apple, so it installs clean. The Windows build is brand new and still going through Microsoft's certification, so Windows will probably warn you it's from an "unrecognized" publisher / a "risk" — that's just the default for any new app before it builds reputation, not a red flag. It's portable: unzip and run.

There's a free tier and a pro tier, no subscription. If anyone wants to try Pro, DM me and I'll sort out a discount.

Site's here if you're curious: https://www.foliosort.app — but mostly I'd love to hear what formats or workflows I've missed and how it could be better (last week I added Events because a photographer told me he would like to sort his photos by event moments - so feel free to ask me about it ).

Thank you,
Tiago

You're doing God's Work, Sir!

 

[tiago.trindade]

You're doing God's Work, Sir!

Thank you!

We're getting very positive feedback and already have users from 40+ countries

Feel free to share any ideas or suggestions to help us improve!