Five New Ways to Sort and Auto-Organize Apple Photos
Our macOS app PhotoSort’s new version released today sorts the Apple Photos library in more ways: - By file size - By aesthetic quality - By camera model or source - By years or decades - By last access date It creates albums sorted as above directly inside the Photos app, making organization and cleanup incredibly easy and efficient. If you have a large library (in iCloud, on Mac, or on external drive), do download the free version now. Available only on the Mac App Store, in several languages. Competing products: 1) Apple Photos and its smart albums provide many ways to sort but not by size, quality, recent use etc. 2) Shortcuts app can do some but not all of what PhotoSort does. We are not aware of any third-party apps that can sort and create sorted albums inside the Photos app. Pricing: Free version (reveals your 15 largest items by file size and the 15 best shots, and two slideshows - one of your Top 20, and another of a selection of your 50 best photos). For full sorting and album creation, upgrade to: Essentials ($6.99 one-time, SizeSort and QualitySort albums) or Premium ($9.99 one-time, All 5 albums). Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photosort-sort-filter-find/id6739038077?mt=12
Collected discussion
Make browsing great again? Really?
Tongue in cheek, really 😛
thanks for making this! it’s quite niche and limited use but the pricetag is very decent, so no complaints! for completeness the free and open source command line tool r/osxphotos, does support folder creation and all these modes (including apple‘s aesthetic scores) but of course that doesn’t mean that there is no space in the market for a user friendly, gui-based tool.
Thanks for the kind feedback. Yes, that's a good tool if you know command line and python, but my frame of reference is apps available on the Mac App Store. Even with PhotoSort's free version, the slideshows are fun and if looking to free up space, the 15 largest files can help a lot.
The album-based approach is the right safety boundary for this kind of cleanup. For large Photos libraries, I would be much more willing to try an organizer that creates reviewable albums than one that moves/deletes anything directly. A few trust details I would make very explicit: whether iCloud-only originals have to be downloaded before sorting whether the app changes the library or only creates albums whether Smart Albums/manual albums are left untouched what happens to hidden/favorite/edited photos an undo/remove-created-albums action for a whole run a simple report showing how many items were sorted into each album The “largest files” angle is especially useful because it gives people a low-risk first workflow: inspect the heavy items, decide manually, then clean up inside Photos.
Nothing is downloaded; iCloud based originals stay up there (Proof: The app can be run offline.) The app only creates albums, nothing else is affected. Only Apple frameworks are used. Yes: PhotoSort folder is created on the first run, and only the albums in it are replaced / updated on subsequent runs. No smart albums, other albums, or other things in the library are touched. Hidden photos are excluded from PhotoSort albums. Favorite/edited photos are included in app's albums but this doesn't affect the Favorites album, edits etc. Not clear what you mean by undo/remove created albums. If whether you can go into Photos and delete the PhotoSort folder or its albums, yes you can - without impacting photos or other albums. The entire library (except hidden and recently deleted items) are sorted. Albums can contain fewer items if you have opted to focus on e.g. the Top 100, bottom 500 etc. As with our other apps, we are very privacy and safety focused. No uploads/downloads to any external servers; no deletions or modifications done by the app.
No offense to the product but the images you used for brand marketing look like an insurance agency is trying to sell me something (I skipped the post thinking it was a promoted ad). I wonder if I'm the only one.
Thanks for the feedback 😄 Did you get this feeling only with the first screenshot (seen when scrolling through the sub), or the other screenshots, too?
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Technical hurdles to it. Mac apps are a lot less sandboxed than iOS apps, so we can access and analyze Mac Photos data more easily. Having said that, the sorted albums that PhotoSort creates on Mac also sync via iCloud to associated iOS devices - so you can get the same info on your mobile devices.