Sort years of photos into folders by the date they were taken.

1. 1

   Choose the folders

   Pick the folders holding your photos and videos, and the place the sorted copy should go.

2. 2

   Scan and review

   eonsort reads every date each file carries and lays out the finished folder tree. Dates that look wrong are set aside under Issues, to check or fix by hand.

3. 3

   Copy files

   The files are copied into the tree. The originals stay exactly where they are, and Undo takes the copy back.

When sources disagree

Weigh the evidence (default)

Discards impossible dates, then prefers the one two sources agree on.

Oldest date wins

Keeps the earliest date any source reports.

First match wins

Walks the sources in order and stops at the first hit.

The setup panel lists every source, one to a line: drag them into the order first match wins walks, and untick the ones you never want asked. How much each source counts when the evidence is weighed is set on the command line.

The whole tree, in advance

Every destination folder with its file count and size. Columns can be resized and reordered, and clicking a folder shows everything beneath it.

Issues, before they are copied

Flagged dates are grouped under Issues. Take the date from another source, type one in, or anchor a single file and shift a whole selection by that offset.

A closer look

Hold Ctrl and turn the wheel over the preview to zoom into a picture, then drag to pan it; the small buttons in the corner do the same, and the zoom clears with the next file.

Corrections kept beside the plan

Overrides and rotations are stored next to the plan file. They survive reopening, they are what the copy uses, and each one can be undone.

Places, worked out here

The city, region and country come from the picture's own GPS reading, matched against a list of places kept on this machine. One button fetches the list, about 11 MB. Nothing leaves the computer.

Ready-made layouts

Plain, by day, by place, and layouts matching immich, PhotoPrism and elodie.

RAW read all the way through

A RAW file is read through the preview the camera stores inside it, so it is deduplicated, turned upright, scored and searched for faces like any other picture.

A copy that can be taken back

Undo removes what the copy wrote and nothing else. A file that was already there, or edited since it landed, stays where it stands, and only the folders the copy made are cleared away. Sources are never touched.

Four things a date alone will not fix

Files that belong together

A live photo is a picture and a video whose dates rarely agree, and sorting them apart puts one memory in two folders. Groups are dated together, RAW beside JPEG and sidecars included.

Copies of the same picture

Files holding the same bytes are grouped by content, heaviest first, with what the repetition costs. One button sends all but one of each to the recycle bin, after asking. Bursts of near-identical frames sit apart in a group of their own: different pictures, never removed.

The date written onto the copy

A copy can carry the date eonsort settled on in its own EXIF block, corrections included, so the next tool to read it does not lose the work. Sources stay untouched.

Work that stops at the folder tree

A small file beside each copy holds the date, the GPS reading, the place, the tags and the names. immich, PhotoPrism, digiKam and Lightroom read these. RAW, HEIC and video get one too.

• TimelineThe plan in three dimensions

  One point per date each source reported, coloured by confidence. Three layouts morph into one another: a disagreement field, a time helix, and a memory terrain. Detail follows distance, from muted dots at range to the photographs themselves up close.

  click to fly auto-fly

• GalleryRooms built from the archive

  A building laid out afresh for every collection: one room per period, sized by what it holds, with short corridors between. Daylight falls through the clerestory. Pictures hang at eye height and videos play in frame. Click to take the mouse, Esc to release it.

  WASD to walk E to open

• RingsA ring for every year

  One circle per year, newest on top, each widening with the files that landed in it and the pictures standing around the rim. Every month has its own colour, so the seasons line up from ring to ring. Spiral unwinds the stack into a single coil.

  dragwheelclick to open

• ChartsThe same questions in two dimensions

  A square per month, year by year: click to go finer, drag for a range. Alongside it, time of day, which source supplied each date, how confident eonsort is, and where the bulk of the files lands. Any selection scopes the whole application.

  clickdrag for a range

• SearchBy what is in the picture

  Pictures are tagged in the background once a scan finishes. Ask in ordinary words, forest and dog, and every view narrows to what matches. Or ask with a picture: Pictures like this one answers with photographs showing something similar, which are not copies of it. A second model marks how good each picture looks, out of ten. What is learned belongs to the picture, not the run, so it survives a rename, a move, or the copy into the sorted tree. Both models run locally.

  Enter tag filter, rated at least

Nothing is overwritten

Same-name files are compared by content. Identical ones are left alone, different ones are stored beside them as _dup_1.

Every copy is atomic

Written to staging, flushed, then renamed into place.

Everything resumes

The scan appends to its plan and the copy keeps a journal. Stopping a run, or losing power, costs nothing.

Sources stay untouched

Scanning and copying never write, move, or delete an original. One button removes source files: Remove extra identical copies, which asks first and sends them to the recycle bin, never past it. Bursts it never touches.