is there a foss project to automatically sort files - eviltoast

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

  • z00s@lemmy.world
    1·
    10 months ago

    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:

    Create a python program that does the following:

-asks the user for a directory to process

-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.

-creates any new sub folders before moving the files

-moves the files verbosely

-gives the user a notification upon finishing

    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.

    • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      9 months ago

      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.