The idea for this one came to mind one summer evening, when I was searching for something on my disks, and realized – it’s a mess.

So, started figuring out this mess by first organizing images and videos backed up from my phone(s) into folders. Phone backups are a nice thing… and usually it’s all in a single folder.

OK, there are options… but it is what it is – now I have a folder called like “Mobile-Backup-XXX”, with all files in it… no subfolders. 🤷‍♂️

Of course, when I opened this folder with thousands of files, and started moving them manually to respective subfolders, it soon became clear that I need help (OK, maybe that was obvious from the start 😁).

A whom do you call for help these days? Ghostbusters? 🤔

Well, no – the answer is always “AI”. More precisely, I called (free) ChatGPT.

Long story short, it helped me to write a nice PowerShell script which will take my folder with thousands of files and slightly organize it by moving those files into (sub)folders named by the date they were taken or created.

After some time, we got the script working, some logging was added, and it was ready for testing – tested it on a few folders, and then realized that sometimes it has issues with reading the “right” metadata, so we reengineered that part.

Some time later, after some other tiny things were polished, script was ready and doing it’s work just as I expected it! Nice!

Now, instead of a folder with thousands of images and videos, I have a folder with hundreds of subfolders… 😅

And if you put stuff into folders, you don’t have to look at it, and it doesn’t bother you anymore, right?! 😁

But OK – it’s a first step in organizing stuff! 😊

Could it be improved?! Of course! But… 🤷‍♂️

The script (Organize-PicsAndVids.ps1) is, as always, available on my GitHub.

Cheers!

P.S. This was also somewhat inspired by an episode from “Scott and Mark Learn To…” series of podcasts by Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich – make sure you subscribe and watch them regularly! They rock! 😊