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
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.
Tidy
@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.
Tidy
@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.
Dial
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
Tidy
@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.
Dial
@sebadiaz appreciate you actually breaking down the two placeholder types separately, most answers would've just said "it handles it" and left it there. the atomic-move-never-half-moved detail is the part that actually earns trust here. will ping you if I ever catch it misbehaving.
Tidy
@galdayan Deal. An edge-case report from someone who reads answers this carefully is worth more than most QA passes — you know where to find me. Thanks for asking the sharpest questions of the launch.
Tidy
Another week, another two versions — and I didn't pick either of them.
v1.3: a user emailed saying his Downloads folder lives in iCloud Drive and Tidy couldn't see it. Fair. You can now point Tidy at any folder you like, iCloud included. Shipped the same day he asked.
v1.4: another user wanted to sort files by a word in the filename, not just by extension ("send everything with 'beatloop' in the name to my Loops folder"). Rules can now match filenames — on their own or combined with an extension. He also caught a real bug: the dry-run plan from a manual pass was being wiped by the automatic sweep a few seconds later. Fixed. The plan now stays until you apply or dismiss it.
Both of them found something I would never have found alone, and both are live for everyone automatically — Tidy updates itself now.
That's the whole method, honestly: someone writes, I fix it that day, everyone gets it. Still $9 once, still no subscription, still nothing leaves your Mac. tidymacapp.com
Keep the emails coming — hola@tidymacapp.com reaches me directly.
Tidy
Tidy 1.8 is out — and it's our biggest update yet 🎉
Two weeks ago we launched here with a promise: you ask, we build. This week a reviewer in Germany put that to the test — his review wished for German localization and fully custom renaming. Both shipped the same day his article did (he gave Tidy 5/5 ⭐).
What's new in 1.8:
🌍 Tidy speaks German — full localization (English, Spanish, German), following your Mac's system language automatically. The website too.
✍️ Name style — control how generated names look: lowercase, separators, German transliteration (ä→ae), and date formats (DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD).
🤖 Free-form AI renaming prompt — write your own naming instructions per rule ("in German, lowercase, date at the end") and Apple's on-device model names your files accordingly. True to our core promise: nothing ever leaves your Mac.
📄 Rules that read INSIDE files — "every PDF that mentions X" is now a rule, powered by on-device OCR.
📌 Rename-only rules — rename files from their content and leave them exactly where they are.
🛡️ Hardened by a triple independent audit — dry-run now covers everything (including Smart Eject), a discreet-notifications option for screen sharing, safer undo, VoiceOver labels on every control.
Existing users: Tidy updates itself — you probably already have it. And the door stays open: tell us what's missing and watch it ship. 🚀
Tidy
Three weeks after launching here, Tidy just shipped 2.0 — and almost every feature in it came from someone who wrote to me.
The one I'm proudest of: Tidy now learns how you file things. It watches only the folders you gave it, and when you move files by hand to the same place three times, it asks: "You've moved 3 PDFs into Invoices. Want a rule?" One click makes the rule, one dismisses it forever. It never automates anything you didn't do first.
Also new: search inside images and scanned PDFs, where Spotlight finds nothing because there's no text layer to index. A privacy audit that warns when a scanned passport or a card number is sitting in your Downloads. Watching any folder you choose, not just Downloads. And a stage mode that hides your Desktop before you share your screen.
The German blogger who gave Tidy its first review asked for two of these. A Reddit commenter asked for another. Two people reported bugs within hours of 2.0 and the fixes went out the same day.
Still $9, one time, no subscription — and it never will be one, because there's no server to pay for. Everything runs on your Mac: no account, no telemetry, nothing uploaded.
If you bought it in July, it already updated itself. If you're new: what's the messiest folder on your Mac right now?