Sort Files Into Subfolders

About sorting files into subfolders

Every computer has the folder. Downloads, or the desktop, or the one called stuff — a few hundred files with no order at all, because sorting them by hand is twenty minutes of dragging and nobody has twenty minutes.

Neither Windows nor macOS will do it for you. They will sort the view by type or date, which lasts until you close the window, but neither will actually put the files into folders.

This tool does. Pick the folder, choose the rule, look at the plan, and either move the files here or take away a script that does it. Nothing is uploaded and nothing moves until you press the button.

Four ways to decide where a file goes

• What they are — Images, Documents, Video, Audio, Archives, Code, Programs, Fonts, and Other for anything unrecognised. The right choice for a Downloads folder
• File extension — one folder per extension: jpg/, pdf/, zip/. Blunter, but exactly what you want when a folder holds twenty kinds of one thing
• First letter of the name — A/, B/, C/, and # for anything not starting with a letter. Good for a large library of similarly-typed files
• Part of the name — the interesting one. Split invoice_2024_01.pdf on _, take part 1, and every invoice lands in invoice/. Set the separator and which piece to use, and any existing naming convention becomes your folder structure

Add an Only these types filter to work on a subset — say, only the PDFs — and leave everything else exactly where it is.

How to use it

• Click Choose a folder to tidy and pick it. Your browser will ask permission to read it
• Pick the rule. The table updates as you change it, so you can try a few before committing
• Read the plan: every file, and the folder it would land in
• Press Move the files now, or download a .bat / .sh script to run yourself

The plan is the point. You see exactly what would happen before anything happens, and changing a setting just redraws the table.

Collisions are refused, not resolved

Two files can only be moved to the same place if one of them overwrites the other, and no tool should make that choice for you. So a row is blocked when:

• A file of that name is already there — the target folder already holds one
• Two files would get the same path — usually when pulling files out of subfolders, where 2023/report.pdf and 2024/report.pdf both want to become Documents/report.pdf

Blocked rows are marked in the table, left exactly where they are, and skipped by both the move and the script. The rest of the batch still goes through — a collision in one file is not a reason to refuse the other three hundred.

Moving here, or a script

Chrome, Edge and Opera can be granted write access to the folder you chose. The subfolders get created and the files moved, in the page, with nothing to install. The browser asks your permission first and you can revoke it at any time.

Firefox and Safari have no way to do that, so those get a script instead: a .bat for Windows or a .sh for Mac and Linux. You open it, read it, and run it yourself.

Unlike the cleanup scripts the other folder tools produce, this one arrives ready to run rather than commented out. Moving a file changes none of its bytes and deletes nothing — and both forms refuse to overwrite, with move prompting on Windows and mv -n declining on Mac and Linux. That is a genuinely different risk from a delete script, and gating it the same way would be theatre.

What people use it for

• Emptying a Downloads folder that has become an archaeological dig
• Filing a camera or phone dump into folders by type
• Turning an export with a naming convention into a real folder structure
• Splitting a flat document archive by first letter so it can be browsed
• Separating source files from deliverables before handing a project over
• 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 files are the same bytes in a different place. Nothing is deleted, ever
• Folders are only created when they are needed, and only for files that actually move
• Only files move. Existing subfolders are left alone unless you tick Also pull files out of subfolders
• A file already sitting in the folder it would be sorted into is skipped rather than moved onto itself
• Characters Windows forbids in a folder name are replaced, so a rule that produces A/B gives you a folder called A-B rather than a failed move
• The Windows script starts with chcp 65001 so folder names with accents or non-Latin characters 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

• Bulk File Rename — fix the names, then sort them
• Folder Size Analyzer — see what is taking up the space first
• Duplicate File Finder — remove the copies before tidying
• Empty Folder Finder — clear the husks left behind afterwards