Tidy
Your Mac tidies itself — and names files by what's inside
131 followers
Your Mac tidies itself — and names files by what's inside
131 followers
Tidy keeps Downloads and the Desktop organised on their own, naming files by reading what's inside them with on-device OCR — "Screenshot 14.22.10.png" becomes "invoice-march.png". Scan paper with your iPhone and the file lands in Downloads already named, never touching your camera roll. Search inside scanned PDFs where Spotlight can't. It refuses to invent: every word in a name must exist in the document. Light or dark, five languages. Never deletes, dry-run, undo. $9 once, no subscription.
Love that it only touches new files and never deletes, took that worry off my mind right away. The plain English rules for Downloads feel like the kind of thing I actually want to set up once and forget about.
Tidy
@bekirtrkneux6c Thank you! "Set up once and forget" is literally the design goal — there's a section on the site with almost exactly that title. My success metric is honestly a bit backwards: the less you open Tidy, the better it's working. The panel is there for the day you're curious about what it did — the other 364 days, it should just quietly earn its $9.
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 :)
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?
the "never deletes" line buried at the end is such a thoughtful trust signal, made me actually relax while reading. and the plain english rules for downloads feel like the right level of magic, on device and inspectable instead of some opaque sorter.
Tidy
@ferdibatszcb Thank you — and you've spotted something real: you're the second person today to say the "never deletes" part is what made them relax. It might deserve a promotion from footnote to headline.
And "the right level of magic" is exactly what I was going for: the AI writes the rule, but the rule is a thing you can see — extensions, folder, minimum age, all visible and editable before it ever runs. Magic that shows its work, not a black box that moves your files on vibes.