Folder Tidy: Fast and Easy Organization of Your Messy Folders

I have almost completely given up on organizing the files and folders on my hard drive. There are just so many files that accumulate before I have a chance to clean up and organize them. Certain folders, like my Desktop and Downloads folders, are always filled up with stuff that I don’t even remember putting there.

That’s where Folder Tidy comes in handy. As you can probably guess by its name, it is an app that can help you organize your existing files neatly into folders. How does it do it? Let’s take a look!

Getting Started

Folder Tidy isn’t a very complex app, but what it does is truly genius. Basically, you just point it to a disorganized folder, then point it to a new folder where you want to store your organized files. It´ll then take over and will do all the cleaning work for you. It will arrange the existing files into corresponding new folders by file type, saving you all that time that you would have spent separating each file from the rest.

It can even get much more specific, if you want it to. That’s what’s great about it: it is ready to clean up anything the first time you launch it, but it is also very customizable and can become a powerful tool without getting too complicated.

The Process

Folder Tidy’s cleanup process is quite simple. As soon as you open it, the app will guide you through a couple steps to get you started cleaning. The first one is pointing the app to the messy folder that you’d like to organize. The default ones are the desktop and the downloads folder, but you can point the app to any folder in your disk.

The second step is choosing the target folder, where the organized files will be sent to. Inside that folder, all your files will be organized into subfolders, organized and named by file type. But we’ll get to how the rules for organizing work next.

Organization

Although Folder Tidy might look a tad too simple at first sight, under the Preferences for the app you can find a few options that can help you tweak the app so that the organization works however you want it to.

Rules

The most important part for customizing how the app works are the Rules. These define where the files end up after the cleanup. By default, the app comes with a set of basic pre-existing rules, which cover pretty much any common file types and extensions. The default ones include Apps, Music, Pictures, Videos, and about a dozen more common preset file types.

You can activate and deactivate any set of rules for each cleanup that you do, and you can also make up your own rules. These basically work through a bunch of logic statements, where you can specify any set of conditions under one single rule. The conditions you can use include kind of file, last opened and modified date, date of creation, name, and file size.

Given the level of customization that the app provides, you can get quite creative with it and use it for doing certain organization tasks that would otherwise waste a lot of your time if done manually.

Ignore

If there are any elements within the folder that you’re getting cleaned up that you’d like to keep intact, you can point the app to it through the Ignore preference. This feature works with both files and folders, and you can add as many of them as you’d like. Once the cleanup process starts, the files that you’ve specified here will not be organized, and instead will be, as the feature puts it, ignored.

Reversing

Once the cleanup process ends, you’ll be shown a window with a few options and a notification that the process was successful. Here you can go to the new organized folder, quit the app, or undo the whole process, returning all the files to the old folder as if nothing had happened. This can be very useful if you setup your rules wrong, selected the wrong folder, or just wanted to try it out and see how it’d work.

Conclusion

Folder Tidy is definitely not the only option around for cleaning up and organizing your desktop or any specific folder. However, it might very well be the most convenient, fast, and easily accessible app for what it does. If you are willing to drop the five bucks for it, I’m certain Folder Tidy will prove quite useful for you, especially if you are an advanced user that would like to get very specific sorting from the app.

Let’s face it, even the most organized of us need a little help from time to time. Even if Folder Tidy’s price seems a bit too high for you, the amount of time that it will save you by sorting your messy folders will more than make up for it.