is there a foss project to automatically sort files
do you know that minecraft mod that autosorts your inventory? is there are project that can autosort a messy file system and put all of your files of a similar nature into a well organised, well named order. obviously this would require ai that could do image, language, and audio recognition but is there anything in the works? i can imagine this would speed up distrohopping by 10x. ai powered file management
This requires no “AI”, just some simple rule-based automation, at most some algorithmic sorting.
Android (or some custom branded Android versions?) automatically save downloaded files in folders by Pictures, Documents, etc unless you tell them.not to.
Office365 offers the PowerAutomate function, but knowing Microsoft they probably overcomplicated things a bunch. [Edit: obviously this isn’t FLOSS, just a hint at what to look for alternatives to…]
This approach never appealed to me as I want to know where things are rather than where some subroutine thinks it belongs, but I’m certain you will find plenty of software that offers an auto sorting feature.
Thats pretty much how I‘d do it. Now I need to sort through a decade of old backups and deduplicate them. Also need to distinguish between „loose“ files and program/website structures which usually have different file types inside. Probably need to auto archive them into tar.gz or something.
Lately I’ve been using chatGPT to create a bunch of small custom python programs to do stuff like this (if I can’t easily find an existing program to do what I want).
For example I would tell it something like:
<span style="color:#323232;">Create a python program that does the following:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-asks the user for a directory to process
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-sorts the files in that folder according to file type, placing them into appropriately named sub-folders, eg all image files into a folder named "images", all music files into "music" and so on.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-creates any new sub folders before moving the files
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-moves the files verbosely
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-gives the user a notification upon finishing
</span>
You can customize it to do exactly what you want, and it takes only seconds for it to give you the code.
I can’t even begin to tell you how much time it’s saved me over the last few weeks, automating simple stuff that would normally take ages.
I think that’s a good start, but the baseline of what AI can do. These scripts are around since filesystems have been invented. And you can do this with one (lengthy) shell command. Or one of the already existing file sorting utils. (something like this [Edit: see next comment] or Hazel or DropIt) With those you can even configure if it should recusively visit subdirectories and do individual subdirectories for the filetypes or mangle everything together for example in one big unsorted mp3 directory.
What I’m waiting for (I’m not OP) is something that looks at the content of the files. Do a directory for all the manuals I downloaded for the household appliances, find out on which event I took a photo and make a correctly named album for that, find the project files for my diverse electronics projects and file them into seperate directories together with related info. And find the mp3 files and TV recordings with a mismatch of metadata and folder structure.
I think what you’re describing is definitely the way things are heading. I would love a teachable, automated AI personal assistant. But I think I’ll wait for an open source, hardware agnostic version that I can self-host.
Does this “obviously” have to use AI? I can see a tool that sorts files into folders based on file extensions, modification dates and/or metadata could get the work done.
And if organising files by content (e.g. “my zoo trip”, “meetings with Xenia”) is that important, doing it manually seems like a better idea because accuracy is presumably important.
I don’t really see the distro hopping argument either. Even if you don’t share your home directory between installs, presumably you copy over your files as directories rather than individually pouring them into one super folder?
I think a lot of folks with very limited IT knowledge think AI will solve things that have been solved for decades.
The issue is availability and elitism. A noob user doesnt know how to find this stuff, google is so rotten that its not help anymore and pros often just shit on them instead of making a comprehensive wiki.
Add comment