DON’T MOVE YOUR PC FILES!
Let this FREE SOFTWARE sort them automatically
If your folders are so disorganised the idea of sorting them out is too daunting to consider, why not let your PC tidy them up for you? Dropit is a fantastic tool that neatly places your files into the relevant
folders, according to the rules that you set up. In this Workshop we’ll show you how to use the program to organise a batch of photos into folders based on the date they were taken. STEP 1 Download Dropit from www.
dropitproject.com and install it. It’s available in both installable and portable versions, but we’ve downloaded the portable one
1 because it doesn’t make any changes to your PC. Download the ZIP file, open it in File Explorer, then copy the ‘Dropit_v8.5.1_portable’ folder to a convenient folder on your hard drive. We put ours into a new folder called ‘Portable programs’, which we created in our C:\users\username folder. Open this to see the program files 2 . You can create a desktop shortcut to the program by right-clicking the Dropit icon 3 , choosing ‘Create shortcut’ 4 , then dragging it to your desktop. STEP 2 Double-click the shortcut
1 . A larger icon will
2 appear on your desktop, which you can reposition where you like. Right-click this and select Associations 3 . This opens the Manage Association window, which contains the rules that tell Dropit what to do with files when you drop them on its icon. Click the green ‘+’ button 4 to open the New Association window 5 . In our example, we’re going to sort a folder of photos from our phone that have been automatically backed up to our PC, but you can apply this process to sorting any kind of file. STEP 3 We want to store our photos in sub-folders labelled according to the year they were taken within the Picture folder. Each of these year folders will contain 12 folders for each month, making it easier to find photos from a particular date. Give the New Association a name 1 , enter the type of file (such as JPEG) you want sorted 2 and choose an action 3 . In the Destination Folder box 4 , enter the location of the folder you’re sending your files to, followed by appropriate Dropit keywords (called ‘abbreviations’ – visit www.snipca.com/32377 for more details). Here we’ve used \%Yeartaken%\%datetaken%\ to sort them into the year and month folders. Click Save 5 .
STEP 4 The rule sits in the Manage Associations window 1 and you can right-click to edit a rule if you need to change it later, or untick it 2 if you don’t want that rule running for a particular task. When you’ve finished creating Associations, click the tick button 3 . Next, open the folder that contains the files you want to process 4 . Select the files (either manually or use Ctrl+a to select them all), then drag them on to the Dropit icon 5 . A ‘Processing with Dropit’ window will open. STEP 5 You may have selected some files that don’t fit the rule and that you want Dropit to ignore. For example, in our photos folder, there are a number of ‘.mov’ and ‘.png’ files that we don’t want moving into our Pictures folder. If this happens, you’ll see a message suggesting that there’s no association for this file 1 . Click Yes to create a new rule, name it 2 , and add the file types to ignore in the Rules section 3 . To filter more than one type, separate each with a semicolon (;). In the Action section, select ‘Ignore’ then click Save 5 . STEP 6 Once any filtering problems have been dealt with, the program moves through the files, choosing those to process. It displays a list of these files 1 before it proceeds to the next step, so you can check it’s selected the correct files. If so, you can proceed by clicking the Start button 2 . If not, click the Stop button 3 to cancel the process. STEP 7 When the process is complete, go to the destination folder(s) to make sure the transfer has worked. We had three months of photos in our test batch that were correctly moved to three folders 1 within a 2019 folder 2 . The program created the year and month folders for us and filed the pictures into the correct ones. Note that a few of the files - in our case, photos from Whatsapp that didn’t have the correct date information attached to them - couldn’t be processed. These were filed in their own folder labelled ‘0’. You can return to these photos and create a new rule that works for them or file them manually.