Sort your photos by the day they were taken.
A desktop app that reads each photo's date and copies it into a tidy Year / Month folder tree. Your originals are never moved or deleted.
Everything it does for your library
Smart about dates, careful with your files.
Smart date detection
Reads EXIF capture dates, Google Takeout sidecars and filesystem timestamps — in priority order — so every file lands on the right day.
Tidy folder trees
Organises everything into Year / Month folders. Choose plain numbers (2024/06) or named months (2024/06-June).
Google Takeout ready
Turn on Takeout mode and it reads photoTakenTime from each sidecar JSON. The JSON files are never copied across.
Every common format
JPEG, PNG, HEIC/HEIF, MOV and MP4. Input folders are scanned recursively, however deep they go.
No overwrites, ever
Duplicate names are auto-renamed — IMG_001.jpg becomes IMG_001 (1).jpg. Nothing is lost.
Bilingual & remembered
Full English and Spanish UI with localised month names, and your settings saved between runs.
Three steps to a sorted library
Pick a folder
Point Photos Sorter at any folder of photos and videos — nested subfolders included.
Choose your options
Month format, language and Google Takeout mode. Set them once — they're remembered.
Get a sorted copy
A clean Year / Month tree appears in your output folder. Originals stay exactly where they are.
When a file might land in the wrong place
Videos use file dates
Videos (.mov, .mp4) don't have their embedded capture date read — they're sorted by file-system timestamps (or a Google Takeout date, if present). If those were altered, a video can land in the wrong month.
Photos with stripped metadata
Screenshots, edited exports, and images received via apps like WhatsApp often lose their EXIF data and fall back to file dates — usually when you downloaded the file, not when it was taken.
Unsupported formats are skipped
Only JPEG, PNG, HEIC/HEIF, MOV and MP4 are processed. RAW (CR2, NEF, DNG), TIFF, GIF, WebP, AVI, MKV and others are skipped and left untouched.
No date? Nothing is lost
If no capture date and no file date can be read at all, the file is copied into an "Unknown" folder so nothing is lost — you can sort those by hand.
Get Photos Sorter
Free and open source. Grab a build for your system, or run it from source.
These builds are unsigned, so your OS shows a one-time security warning. Here's how to allow Photos Sorter on each system.
macOS says the app is from an unidentified developer and can't be checked for malware. After moving Photos Sorter to your Applications folder, run this once in Terminal, then open it normally:
Windows SmartScreen warns that the publisher is unknown. Click "More info" on the dialog, then "Run anyway".
Make the AppImage executable, then run it:
./Photos-Sorter-linux.AppImage