Tidy - Your Mac tidies itself: screenshots, installers, Downloads
by•
Tidy lives in your menu bar and handles three chores you keep doing by hand.
It archives new Desktop screenshots, renaming them from their content with on-device OCR — "Screenshot 14.22.10.png" becomes "invoice-march.png".
It ejects the .dmg you mounted and trashes the installer.
It sorts new Downloads by type, with rules you write in plain English. Apple Intelligence builds them on-device, so nothing leaves your Mac.
Only touches new files. Never deletes. $9 once, no subscription.
Replies
the screenshots renamed via on-device OCR is such a thoughtful touch. honestly didn't know i needed it until i saw it. love that it only touches new files too, feels safe to leave running.
Tidy
@berilyldrtfy2q Thank you! That feature came straight from my own pain: squinting at a wall of "Screenshot 14.22.10.png" thumbnails trying to find one bank receipt. Naming them by what they actually say felt obvious in hindsight — the best tweaks usually do.
And "feels safe to leave running" honestly made my day — that was the entire design brief in five words.
Would love a "dry run" mode before it actually moves files - maybe a weekly notification showing what it would have done so I can catch any rule tweaks before things get shuffled around.
Tidy
@zge6ydq That's a genuinely good idea — added to the 1.1 list (this thread is writing my roadmap for me, and I love it).
Today the model is the reverse: act → show → undo. Every move lands in the Activity log with filename and destination, and one click reverses it. Since nothing is ever deleted, a "wrong" move is a 10-second fix rather than a lost file.
But I get the appeal of seeing the plan before anything moves at all — especially in week one while you're tuning rules. A dry-run toggle fits Tidy's philosophy perfectly: trust through transparency. Thanks for this one.
Love the "never deletes" promise and the plain-English rules idea. One thought: a quick "undo" or staging area where I can preview what Tidy is about to do before it actually renames or moves things would make me way more comfortable letting it run unsupervised on my Downloads folder.
Tidy
@azadtekeli Good news on half of that: Undo already exists! Every action lands in the Activity log, and there's a one-click Undo right in the panel — it even survives app restarts. And since Tidy never deletes, Undo always has something to restore from.
The preview/staging half: you're the second person in this thread to ask for exactly that, so a dry-run mode officially went on the 1.1 list an hour ago. Clearly the right instinct — if the tool shows its plan, you don't have to trust it blindly. That's the direction Tidy is heading.
honestly the plain english rules thing is what got me, i typed "put pdfs from clients into Work/Clients" and it just worked. apple intelligence on-device feels like the right call too
Tidy
@ceydausoa This comment genuinely made my day — you're the first person to confirm the AI rules working out in the wild, on a Mac I've never seen, with a phrasing I never tested. That "it just worked" is Apple's on-device model doing the inference, plus a strict validator double-checking its output before the rule goes live.
And yes, on-device was non-negotiable: a tool that reads your file names has no business sending them anywhere.
If a phrasing ever misfires, tell me — I tune the prompt with real examples.
Love the plain English rules for Downloads, that's exactly the kind of thing I'd actually use. One thing I'd love is the ability to undo a sort run if a rule misfires, since sorting is the kind of action that feels safer when you can roll it back.
Tidy
@egemenucaf Undo is already in there — every move lands in the Activity log and one click reverses it, and the undo stack even survives restarts. But your ask has a fair nuance: today it's per-file, so rolling back a whole sorting pass takes a few clicks. A true "undo this run" — one click to revert everything a pass just did — is a clean upgrade, and it joins the dry-run mode others requested today on the 1.1 list.
Between a preview before and a run-level undo after, a misfiring rule becomes a non-event. That's exactly where this is heading.
the fact that it only touches new files and never deletes anything is such a thoughtful call, basically removes all the anxiety of letting a tool mess with your stuff.
Tidy
@birsensfl7 Thank you! Honest origin story: I've never trusted "cleanup" tools myself — so I built the one I'd trust. The rule I gave myself was simple: the worst possible bug should be "a file moved somewhere visible", never "a file gone". If that's the ceiling of what can go wrong, you can actually relax.
Anxiety was the real competitor here, more than any other app.
Screenshot auto-renaming on Mac is one of those tiny things I never bothered to fix and now wish I had sooner. The "never deletes, only touches new files" promise is what sold me.
Tidy
@glenakbeleokoa Thank you! Screenshots are the perfect example of an annoyance too small to fix but too frequent to ignore — 30 seconds of squinting at thumbnails, 40 times a week. It never feels worth automating until someone automates it for you.
And you're in good company: "never deletes" is officially the most-quoted line of this launch. I'm taking the hint for the homepage :)
Love the plain English rules and the on-device approach. One idea: let me exclude folders from the auto-sort, since I keep a Downloads subfolder for client assets that I want untouched. A simple right-click "ignore this folder" option would save me from writing a rule for every exception.
Tidy
@resuljfoq Good news — your client-assets folder is already untouchable, by design. Tidy only ever looks at loose files at the top level of Downloads: it never recurses into subfolders, and it never moves folders themselves. So everything inside your subfolder is invisible to the sorter — no rule or exception needed. (Someone earlier in the thread had the exact same worry about a WIP folder — clearly a thing many of us do!)
An explicit "ignore this folder" control is already on the 1.1 list though, and I like the right-click idea for it. If Tidy ever gains optional deeper sorting, that toggle ships first.
finally something that doesnt try to be a whole file manager. the ocr renaming actually got my messy desktop down to zero icons in a couple days.
Tidy
@abdulsametykzn Zero icons — that's the dream state, thanks for sharing it! And the "doesn't try to be a whole file manager" part is very deliberate: Tidy does three chores and refuses to grow a dashboard. Scope is a feature. The moment a utility needs its own onboarding, it's become the mess it was supposed to clean.
The OCR rename for screenshots is genuinely useful, turned a messy pile into something I could actually search. The plain English rules for Downloads feel like the right idea too, though I wish I could preview where a file would land before it moves.
Tidy
@salimwpnh "Something I could actually search" — that's the quiet superpower of the OCR names, glad you found it. Spotlight suddenly works on your screenshots.
And you're the third person today asking to see where a file will land before it moves — that officially makes dry-run/preview the most-requested feature of this launch, and it's locked in for 1.1. Current thinking: a pending list showing "file → destination" so tuning a rule takes seconds instead of trial and error. This thread is doing my product design for me and I'm not complaining.