Tidy - Your Mac tidies itself: screenshots, installers, Downloads
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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
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
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.
the on-device OCR renaming screenshots based on their actual content is such a clever touch. feels like the kind of small detail that makes you trust the rest of the app to do the right thing.
@berkevgo Thank you! You can judge a restaurant by its bathroom — small, unseen care predicts the rest. That was the bet with Tidy: an app that touches your files has to earn trust in the smallest details first, because that's where people decide whether to believe the big promises. Really glad the OCR naming carried that weight for you.
The screenshot renaming with on-device OCR is genuinely useful, finally my Desktop isn't a graveyard of "Screenshot 14.22.10.png" files. Love that it only handles new files and never nukes anything, plus nine bucks once feels right for something this focused.
@ezgiirru "A graveyard of Screenshot 14.22.10.png files" — that's the most accurate description of my old Desktop I've ever read.
And thank you for saying the price feels right. $9-once only works because the app is this narrow: no servers, no per-user costs, nothing to subscribe you to. A focused tool gets to cost what a lunch costs — once.
the "only touches new files, never deletes" design is the right call for something running unsupervised. one edge case I'm curious about: I have Desktop & Downloads Folder sync turned on through iCloud, so files sometimes sit as not-yet-downloaded placeholders for a few seconds. does Tidy wait for a file to actually finish downloading locally before it acts, or is there a chance it grabs a placeholder mid-sync
@galdayan Great edge case — the most technical question of the launch, and it deserves a straight answer.
Three layers protect you here:
1. Old-style ".icloud" placeholder stubs are dot-hidden files with an .icloud extension — Tidy skips them twice over (hidden files are excluded from every scan, and the extension matches no rule).
2. Modern "dataless" files (real name, content on demand): reading one — like the OCR does — makes macOS materialize it first, and moving one out of a synced folder does the same. If it can't be materialized (offline), the move simply errors: FileManager moves are atomic, so a file is never left half-moved. Tidy logs it and catches it on a later pass.
3. Tidy also refuses to touch 0-byte files or anything modified in the last 45 seconds — the general guard against in-flight transfers.
Honest footnote: I haven't run a dedicated iCloud sync test matrix yet — it's now on the QA list, and I'd genuinely love a report if you ever see it misbehave. The design intent is exactly what you'd hope: when in doubt, do nothing and try later.