Tidy
Names and finds your files by what's inside them
131 followers
Names and finds your files by what's inside them
131 followers
Tidy names and finds your files by reading what's inside them, on your Mac. Press ⌥Space to search inside scanned PDFs and photos, where Spotlight can't. "Screenshot 14.22.10.png" becomes "invoice-march.png", and it refuses to invent: every word in a name must exist in the document. New in 2.9: a safety net for AI agents. Protect a folder before Claude or Codex works in it, then undo what it moved or deleted in one click. Five languages. Never deletes, dry-run, undo. $9 once, no subscription.
Auto-organizing Downloads and screenshots is one of those "small thing, huge relief" features. Does it let you set custom rules per file type, or is the sorting logic fixed?
@ark_y_k Fully custom! Sorting is rule-based: each rule is a set of extensions → a destination folder, and you can edit everything — add your own rules, change the folders, set a minimum age (e.g. "only move installers older than 1 day"), group into monthly subfolders, or toggle any rule off.
It ships with sensible defaults (Documents, Images, Archives, Installers…) so it works with zero setup, but nothing is fixed.
And the part I'm most proud of: you can just type a rule in plain English — "PDF invoices to Finance" — and Apple Intelligence builds it on-device, inferring the extensions, folder and icon. No syntax to learn, and nothing leaves your Mac.
@sebadiaz That's great — being able to set a minimum age per rule is exactly the kind of control I'd want. Do you have any default rule templates for people who don't want to set everything up manually, or is it fully build-your-own from the start?
@ark_y_k Zero setup needed — Tidy ships with 7 rules already on and working: Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Images, Web pages, Archives, and Installers (that one comes with the 1-day minimum age, so fresh downloads stay put while yesterday's installers get filed).
On top of that there's a one-tap template gallery for extras — Audio, Videos, Design files (PSD/Sketch/Figma), eBooks, Code — plus a blank rule if you want full control, and the plain-English AI option if you'd rather just describe it.
So the honest answer: most people never need to configure anything. The controls are there for the day you want them.
@sebadiaz 7 rules covering that much out of the box is impressive for zero setup. Sounds like the "minimum age" logic is doing a lot of the smart filtering behind the scenes — nice touch.
Hi! Does it leave a log of some sort? Meaning, in the case of "hey, where is my file?" can the user know quickly what happened to it?
@luis_parker Yes! The menu bar panel has a live Activity log — every action is recorded with the filename and timestamp: "invoice.pdf → Documents", "Screenshot archived and renamed: …", "Installer to Trash: …". So "where did it go?" is answered at a glance for recent actions, and there's a one-click Undo right next to it.
And as a deeper safety net: since Tidy never deletes, a file is always in one of three predictable places — its rule's folder inside Downloads, the screenshots archive (one click to open from the panel), or the Trash. Never gone.
A full searchable history is a fair ask though — adding it to the 1.1 list. Thanks!
@sebadiaz Awesome, thank you!
the "only touches new files, never deletes" design is the right call for something running unsupervised. one edge case I'm curious about: I have Desktop & Downloads Folder sync turned on through iCloud, so files sometimes sit as not-yet-downloaded placeholders for a few seconds. does Tidy wait for a file to actually finish downloading locally before it acts, or is there a chance it grabs a placeholder mid-sync
@galdayan Great edge case — the most technical question of the launch, and it deserves a straight answer.
Three layers protect you here:
1. Old-style ".icloud" placeholder stubs are dot-hidden files with an .icloud extension — Tidy skips them twice over (hidden files are excluded from every scan, and the extension matches no rule).
2. Modern "dataless" files (real name, content on demand): reading one — like the OCR does — makes macOS materialize it first, and moving one out of a synced folder does the same. If it can't be materialized (offline), the move simply errors: FileManager moves are atomic, so a file is never left half-moved. Tidy logs it and catches it on a later pass.
3. Tidy also refuses to touch 0-byte files or anything modified in the last 45 seconds — the general guard against in-flight transfers.
Honest footnote: I haven't run a dedicated iCloud sync test matrix yet — it's now on the QA list, and I'd genuinely love a report if you ever see it misbehave. The design intent is exactly what you'd hope: when in doubt, do nothing and try later.
@sebadiaz appreciate you actually breaking down the two placeholder types separately, most answers would've just said "it handles it" and left it there. the atomic-move-never-half-moved detail is the part that actually earns trust here. will ping you if I ever catch it misbehaving.
@galdayan Deal. An edge-case report from someone who reads answers this carefully is worth more than most QA passes — you know where to find me. Thanks for asking the sharpest questions of the launch.
Love how it only touches new files and never deletes, that alone makes me trust it more than most utilities. One idea: let me exclude specific folders from the Downloads sorter, since I keep a WIP folder inside Downloads where client assets live that I don't want shuffled into Images or Documents at midnight.
@aleynal0ij Thank you — that trust is exactly what I optimized for.
And good news about your WIP folder: it's already safe, by design. The sorter only looks at loose files sitting at the top level of Downloads — it never looks inside folders, and it never moves folders (the only exception is .app bundles, which macOS treats as single files). So your client assets are invisible to Tidy, at midnight and always.
That said, an explicit exclude list is a fair idea for power users — adding it to the 1.1 list. Thanks for the thoughtful suggestion!
Would love a "dry run" mode before it actually moves files - maybe a weekly notification showing what it would have done so I can catch any rule tweaks before things get shuffled around.
@zge6ydq That's a genuinely good idea — added to the 1.1 list (this thread is writing my roadmap for me, and I love it).
Today the model is the reverse: act → show → undo. Every move lands in the Activity log with filename and destination, and one click reverses it. Since nothing is ever deleted, a "wrong" move is a 10-second fix rather than a lost file.
But I get the appeal of seeing the plan before anything moves at all — especially in week one while you're tuning rules. A dry-run toggle fits Tidy's philosophy perfectly: trust through transparency. Thanks for this one.
Love the "never deletes" promise and the plain-English rules idea. One thought: a quick "undo" or staging area where I can preview what Tidy is about to do before it actually renames or moves things would make me way more comfortable letting it run unsupervised on my Downloads folder.
@azadtekeli Good news on half of that: Undo already exists! Every action lands in the Activity log, and there's a one-click Undo right in the panel — it even survives app restarts. And since Tidy never deletes, Undo always has something to restore from.
The preview/staging half: you're the second person in this thread to ask for exactly that, so a dry-run mode officially went on the 1.1 list an hour ago. Clearly the right instinct — if the tool shows its plan, you don't have to trust it blindly. That's the direction Tidy is heading.