File Organizer

A command-line utility that organizes files into folders based on descriptions of their content, while ensuring that no folder is unhelpfully vague or overly specific. Very obviously inspired by llama-fs, the main differences being:

• It never renames any files, it just puts them into folders, file names are generally pretty helpful.
• The organization is hopefully much smarter, helping you locate groups of files regardless of their names

Usage

At the moment the tool has to be run manually in separate stages (see Further Work below).

python organize.py --describe path_to_folder

Reads all the files in path_to_folder and gets an LLM to describe them in detail. These descriptions are cached in a folder called db as JSON files based on the inode ID of the file, so even if they move around the filesystem, the cache will still be valid.

python organize.py --categorize path_to_folder

Reads all the files in path_to_folder that have a cached description from the previous step. It then comes up with a proposed category for each one and writes these categories into a file called db/categorized_paths.json. It ignores folders, assuming if you put something in a folder that's already a pretty good category. It will however re-organize files that are in folders it previously created.

python organize.py --recategorize path_to_folder

Reads all the files in db/categorized_paths.json and makes sure none of the categories are either too vague or too specific:

• If a category has 3 or fewer files, it will attempt to merge them into larger existing categories
• If a single category accounts for 20% or more of the files, it will attempt to split them into more specific categories
• It will make up to 5 passes over the data to try and get this right (since the first pass might create too many small categories, or another big category).

python organize.py --move path_to_folder

Takes the files described in db/categorized_paths.json and moves them into folders named after their categories with the suffix "(Auto)". It will record which folders it generated in a file called db/auto_generated_folders.json; if you run it multiple times and it ends up emptying out an auto-generated folder that folder will be deleted.

Further work

Getting organization to work was the fun part, there's a bunch of grunt work to do:

• Obviously the whole thing runs in stages right now; the expectation is that some higher-level process will be taking care of deciding when to describe files, when to categorize, when to re-categorize, and when to move. I would expect this to be a cute little Electron desktop app or something.
• categorized_paths.json does not account for you ever running this on more than one folder! The whole thing needs to be refactored so that categorized_paths and auto_generated_folders take into account that not every file lives in one folder.
• Not all the files are usefully described. At the moment it can't read WEBP files, so it tends to sort them into a category called "webp files" which isn't very helpful. It also has trouble with some audio and video files.