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organize - The file management automation tool
Full documentation at Read the docs

organize v2 is released!

This is a huge update with lots of improvements. Please backup all your important stuff before running and use the simulate option!

• See the changelog for all the new features!
• Migration guide from organize v1

About

Your desktop is a mess? You cannot find anything in your downloads and documents? Sorting and renaming all these files by hand is too tedious? Time to automate it once and benefit from it forever.

organize is a command line, open-source alternative to apps like Hazel (macOS) or File Juggler (Windows).

Features

Some highlights include:

• Free and open source. Please donate if it is useful for you!
• Works on macOS, Windows and Linux
• Safe moving, renaming, copying of files and folders with conflict resolution options
• Fast duplicate file detection
• Exif tags extraction
• Categorization via text extracted from PDF, DOCX and many more
• Supports remote file locations like FTP, WebDAV, S3 Buckets, SSH and many more
• Powerful template engine
• Inline python and shell commands as filters and actions for maximum flexibility
• Everything can be simulated before touching your files.

Getting started

Installation

organize works on macOS, Windows and Linux.

Only python 3.6+ is needed. Install it via your package manager or from python.org.

Installation is done via pip. Note that the package name is organize-tool:

pip3 install -U organize-tool

If you want the text extraction capabilities, install with textract like this:

pip3 install -U "organize-tool[textract]"

This command can also be used to update to the newest version. Now you can run organize --help to check if the installation was successful.

Create your first rule

In your shell, run organize edit to edit the configuration:

rules:
  - name: "Find PDFs"
    locations:
      - ~/Downloads
    subfolders: true
    filters:
      - extension: pdf
    actions:
      - echo: "Found PDF!"

If you have problems editing the configuration you can run organize reveal to reveal the configuration folder in your file manager. You can then edit the config.yaml in your favourite editor.

save your config file and run:

organize run

You will see a list of all .pdf files you have in your downloads folder (+ subfolders). For now we only show the text Found PDF! for each file, but this will change soon... (If it shows Nothing to do you simply don't have any pdfs in your downloads folder).

Run organize edit again and add a move-action to your rule:

actions:
  - echo: "Found PDF!"
  - move: ~/Documents/PDFs/

Now run organize sim to see what would happen without touching your files.

You will see that your pdf-files would be moved over to your Documents/PDFs folder.

Congratulations, you just automated your first task. You can now run organize run whenever you like and all your pdfs are a bit more organized. It's that easy.

There is so much more. You want to rename / copy files, run custom shell- or python scripts, match names with regular expressions or use placeholder variables? organize has you covered. Have a look at the advanced usage example below!

Example rules

Here are some examples of simple organization and cleanup rules. Modify to your needs!

Move all invoices, orders or purchase documents into your documents folder:

rules:
  - name: "Sort my invoices and receipts"
    locations: ~/Downloads
    subfolders: true
    filters:
      - extension: pdf
      - name:
          contains:
            - Invoice
            - Order
            - Purchase
          case_sensitive: false
    actions:
      - move: ~/Documents/Shopping/

Recursively delete all empty directories:

rules:
  - name: "Recursively delete all empty directories"
    locations:
      - path: ~/Downloads
    targets: dirs
    subfolders: true
    targets: dirs
    filters:
      - empty
    actions:
      - delete

You'll find many more examples in the full documentation.

Command line interface

Usage: organize [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  organize

  The file management automation tool.

Options:
  --version   Show the version and exit.
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  run     Organizes your files according to your rules.
  sim     Simulates a run (does not touch your files).
  edit    Edit the rules.
  check   Checks whether a given config file is valid.
  reveal  Reveals the default config file.
  schema  Prints the json schema for config files.
  docs    Opens the documentation.

Other donation options:

ETH:

0x8924a060CD533699E230C5694EC95b26BC4168E7

BTC:

39vpniiZk8qqGB2xEqcDjtWxngFCCdWGjY