Welcome to organize's documentation#

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

v3 is now available#

The new version should be much faster and fix a lot of bugs. It also comes with a some new actions, filters and options.

If you encounter any other bugs or problems during the migration, please reach out!

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).

People use this for:#

Sorting and tagging pictures into various folder structures based on EXIF data
Sorting and renaming PDF invoices based on file content
Removing incomplete downloads from their ~/Downloads
Cleaning up their ~/Desktop from unused files
Freeing up disk space by removing duplicates
Automating various business processes
and many more

Features#

Some highlights include:

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.
Powerful template engine.
Inline python and shell commands as filters and actions for maximum flexibility.
Everything can be simulated before touching your files.
Works on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Free and open source software.

Getting started#

Installation#

Only python 3.9+ 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:

pip install -U organize-tool

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 new and then 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 show --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
    filters:
      - empty
    actions:
      - delete

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

Command line interface#

organize - The file management automation tool.

Usage:
  organize run   [options] [<config>]
  organize sim   [options] [<config>]
  organize new   [<config>]
  organize edit  [<config>]
  organize check [<config>]
  organize debug [<config>]
  organize show  [--path|--reveal] [<config>]
  organize list
  organize docs
  organize --version
  organize --help

Commands:
  run        Organize your files.
  sim        Simulate organizing your files.
  new        Creates a new config.
  edit       Edit the config file with $EDITOR.
  check      Check whether the config file is valid.
  debug      Shows the raw config parsing steps.
  show       Print the config to stdout.
               Use --reveal to reveal the file in your file manager
               Use --path to show the path to the file
  list       Lists config files found in the default locations.
  docs       Open the documentation.

Options:
  <config>                        A config name or path to a config file
  -W --working-dir <dir>          The working directory
  -F --format (default|jsonl)     The output format [Default: default]
  -T --tags <tags>                Tags to run (eg. "initial,release")
  -S --skip-tags <tags>           Tags to skip
  -h --help                       Show this help page.

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