Organize Files by Date

About sorting files by date

A phone or camera produces the same folder every time: three hundred files called IMG_4471.JPG, all in one place, in no order that means anything.

Windows and macOS will sort the view by date. Close the window and it is gone. Neither one will actually put the files into folders.

This tool does. Pick the folder, choose the shape of the date folders, look at the plan, and either move the files here or take away a script that does it.

How to use it

• Click Choose a folder of photos or files and pick it. Your browser will ask permission to read it
• Leave Date taken selected for photos, or switch to Date modified for anything else
• Pick the folder shape — 2026-09, 2026 / 09, 2026 / 2026-09, or down to the day
• Read the plan: every file, the date it was filed under, and the folder it lands in
• Press Move the files now, or download a .bat / .sh script to run yourself

Which date, and why it matters

This is the whole question, and getting it wrong is why filing photos by hand goes wrong.

• Date taken is the moment the shutter fired. The camera writes it inside the JPEG, so it survives copying, syncing, restoring from a backup, and downloading from Google Photos or iCloud. It is the real date of the picture, and it is what this tool uses by default
• Date modified is the filesystem's date. Copy a photo from 2019 onto a new laptop and this becomes today. That is exactly how a decade of holidays ends up filed under one month

A file with no date inside it — a video, a PDF, a screenshot — falls back to its modified date, and the count of how many did that is shown above the table so you always know which answer you are looking at.

Date created is not offered. A web page cannot see it: browsers hand over the modified date and nothing else. Showing a made-up "created" column would be worse than leaving it out.

What it reads the date from

The date taken is read from the first part of each file, so a folder of 40 MB raw files is still quick.

• JPEG — the standard EXIF block written by every phone and camera
• TIFF and camera raw — DNG, CR2, NEF, ARW, ORF, RW2, SRW and friends
• WebP — when the EXIF block was carried over
• Everything else — modified date

Six ways to shape the folders

• 2026-09 — one folder per month. The best default for most people
• 2026 / 09 — a folder per year, months inside
• 2026 — a folder per year only, for a big archive
• 2026 / 2026-09 — months that still read correctly when dragged somewhere else
• 2026-09-10 and 2026 / 09 / 10 — down to the day, for event or job photography

Collisions are refused, not resolved

Two files can only land in the same place if one overwrites the other, and no tool should make that choice for you. A row is blocked when a file of that name is already in the target folder, or when two files would end up at the same path — which happens when pulling files out of subfolders, where Trip A/IMG_001.jpg and Trip B/IMG_001.jpg both want to become 2026-09/IMG_001.jpg.

Blocked rows are marked, left where they are, and skipped by both the move and the script. The rest of the batch still goes through.

What people use it for

• Emptying a camera or phone dump into a real archive
• Filing years of photos restored from a backup, where every modified date says today
• Sorting downloaded photos from Google Photos, iCloud or Dropbox
• Filing scanned documents by the month they were scanned
• Putting screen recordings and exports into dated folders before archiving
• Getting a shared drive into a shape other people can find things in

Good to know

• Works on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS — it is a web page, so there is nothing to install. It cannot work on iPhone, iPad or Android: mobile browsers have no way to hand a folder to a web page
• Nothing is uploaded. Reading, planning and moving all happen in the page
• Moving is reversible — the same bytes in a different place. Nothing is deleted, ever
• Photos are only read, never rewritten, so the EXIF data inside them is untouched
• Folders are created only when they are needed
• A file already sitting in the folder it would be filed into is skipped rather than moved onto itself
• The Windows script starts with chcp 65001 so accented folder names are created correctly
• Very large folders are capped at 200,000 items so the page cannot freeze
• The table shows the first 400 rows; the script always contains every file

Related tools

• Sort Files Into Subfolders — the same idea, by type or name instead of date
• Bulk File Rename — put the date in the file name too
• Image Metadata Viewer — see the taken date and everything else in one photo
• Duplicate File Finder — remove the copies before filing
• Files Changed Since — find what moved in a date range