Best Program to Sort Photos Into Folders by Date on Windows 10 & 11 (2026)

PhotoMove is simple and good at exactly this job. The free version sorts an unlimited number of photos and videos (RAW included) by EXIF date into Year / Month / Day layouts, shows a preview before it copies or moves, and can undo the last batch. It can also sort a Google Takeout export by the date in the JSON sidecar for free; Pro writes that date back into the file. PhotoMove does not run on macOS — on a Mac it needs Parallels or another virtual machine.

Verdict: best if you only need the date move and want the cheapest paid option.

Reasons to skip it: undo covers only the last batch in the same session and does not restore files overwritten at the destination. Duplicate handling is Pro and exact only (by file name or file contents), so resized or re-compressed copies stay. Its site lists no drive merging, GPS place names or AI search. FolioSort wins on everything after the move.

A batch renamer that can also copy or move files into locations built from metadata: EXIF date, camera, and GPS turned into city and country names from a 100,000-city database. It can undo a complete batch.

Choose it if: you want to rename and file photos in one pass and like building the rule yourself.

Reasons to skip it: you assemble the rule yourself rather than picking a folder structure, and there is no duplicate detection or Takeout handling.

The metadata engine many other tools are built on. One command sorts files into folders by capture date:

exiftool -r -d "D:\Sorted\%Y\%m" "-Directory<DateTimeOriginal" "D:\Unsorted"

That moves every file under D:\Unsorted into D:\Sorted\2024\07 and so on, by its EXIF date; files without one stay put. Inside a .bat file every % has to be doubled.

Choose it if: you are comfortable in Command Prompt and want something you can script and schedule for free.

Reasons to skip it: command line only. There is no preview and no undo — the command moves the files the moment you press Enter, so run it on a copy first. No duplicate detection, and Google Takeout needs custom commands.

A full photo manager from the KDE project, with albums, tags, local face recognition and similar-photo detection. Its import tool can create date-based albums as it imports.

Choose it if: you want a catalog to browse and tag in every day, and will not pay for one.

Reasons to skip it: it is a database catalog, not a tool for re-sorting a library already on disk, and the learning curve is steep. Compared properly on best photo manager for Windows.

A fast folder browser for 500+ formats including RAW and HEIC, with a duplicate file finder and a batch renamer that can use EXIF tokens such as the date taken.

Choose it if: you want a free viewer to look through folders and rename files by date.

Reasons to skip it: its site lists batch rename, not sorting into dated folders, and does not say whether the duplicate finder catches similar photos.

A quick, Explorer-like viewer with broad RAW support. It sorts the view by Date Taken, batch renames by EXIF date, and has an "Import Photos and Videos" tool.

Choose it if: you mainly want to look at photos fast and rename them by date.

Reasons to skip it: FastStone's site does not confirm that the import tool builds dated subfolders, and there is no duplicate finder.

Photos shows the folders you add and searches by date or by GPS location. Natural-language search works only on Copilot+ PCs, and face grouping lives in the older "Photos Legacy" app.

Choose it if: you only want to look at your photos by date, not move them.

Reasons to skip it: Microsoft describes no feature that files photos into dated folders, so you would be dragging them by hand.

An interactive command-line tool (a double-click .exe on Windows) that finds every photo in a Google Takeout export, fixes the dates from the JSON and puts them in one big folder or in folders by month. The original project stopped at v3.4.3 on 24 September 2023; the active successor is the Xentraxx fork (v6.4.0, released 23 September 2026), which also writes timestamps, GPS and captions into EXIF and needs ExifTool for non-JPEG files.

Choose it if: you are on Linux or a NAS, or want to script a Takeout conversion.

Reasons to skip it: it moves files by default (keep the zips), has no preview window, and only handles Takeout. FolioSort does the same repair free in a normal window — see our GooglePhotosTakeoutHelper comparison and the Google Photos to Windows guide.