Questions about FolioSort, answered straight

No. FolioSort Pro and Elite are one-time purchases with lifetime licenses. Pay once, use forever. No recurring fees, no account required.

No. Your photos, videos and their contents are processed 100% locally and are never uploaded anywhere. Even the AI features run entirely on your own machine — they work with Wi-Fi off.

Four things. The Library: a timeline, map, people and events over the folders and drives your photos are already on, without importing them — free on every tier. Tag & Fix: AI Tags writes keywords into the files, Places writes city and country and gives camera photos a location from the phone photos taken around them, Dates fixes missing or wrong capture dates, and Edit metadata changes captions, keywords, author and copyright in bulk. Protect: Backup Copy keeps a verified copy on another drive, and Archive Health finds files that went bad and restores them from it. And Labs: six small tools, marked BETA. FolioSort 5 is a free update for everyone who bought Pro or Elite.

Yes. The Library keeps the photos of an unplugged drive on screen as greyed tiles that name the drive, drawn from the thumbnails FolioSort already made. Plug the drive back in and they fill in again in place — nothing is rebuilt, and nothing was removed.

Yes, with Backup Copy. It copies a library folder to another drive or a NAS with the same folder structure, reads every copy back and compares its hash with the original, and from then on copies only new photos. Deleting a photo never deletes it from the backup. Archive Health then checks the library for files that changed or went bad and restores them from the verified copy. Both are Pro; the Free tier covers the first 100 files.

Yes. FolioSort verifies every transfer with checksums (XXHash64 or SHA-256), offers full undo for up to 50 batch operations, and never touches your originals without a verified copy.

Yes — with the Pro license. Canon CR2/CR3, Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, Fujifilm RAF, Panasonic RW2, Olympus ORF, Pentax PEF and more, plus cinema RAW from Blackmagic, RED and ARRI.

Yes, on every tier — where your photos live is not a paid feature. FolioSort works with SMB and AFP network shares (Synology, QNAP, etc.) and iCloud Drive, with auto-download for cloud-only files and resilient retry logic. The free version organizes up to 100 files per run; Pro removes the limit.

Every operation can be undone with one click. FolioSort keeps a persistent history of up to 50 batch operations across sessions and cleans up empty folders when reverting.

No, not to manage the library. FolioSort browses it as a timeline and a map without importing it, organizes it into dated, named folders, merges several drives into one de-duplicated library, writes keywords, places and corrected dates into the files, clears out duplicates, blurry frames and screenshots, finds any photo by plain-language search, face, text inside the image or automatic event, and keeps a verified backup — all on your machine, with no catalog and no import step. A second app is only for something FolioSort deliberately does not do: developing RAW files, or serving the library to your phone over the web. Because the output is plain folders and real EXIF, any of those opens it later without converting anything.

Yes. The Free tier is fully functional — organize up to 100 files per batch, review duplicates and blurry shots, and taste the AI search on 500 photos. Google Takeout import is free forever.

Full refund within 14 days of purchase — whether or not the license key has been activated, and you don't need to give a reason. Refunds are processed within 5–10 business days.

Pro is everything unlimited on one computer: organize, rename, merge, undo, RAW, place names, date fixing, Edit metadata, duplicate, blurry and screenshot cleanup, Backup Copy and Archive Health. Elite adds everything that runs a neural network — AI search of your whole library, AI Tags, Find a Person, People in the Library, text-in-photo search, automatic events, AI Cull beyond the first 20 photos of a folder and Best Shot beyond the first 20 cleanups — plus Smart Folders, Workflows and Watch Folders automation, a monthly archive check, use on 3 devices across Mac and Windows, and priority support.

With Elite, yes: one key activates on up to 3 devices, and you can mix Mac and Windows freely. Pro covers 1 computer. You can deactivate a device yourself at any time to move the license.

Yes — Elite is available on this page whenever you're ready. If you bought Pro recently, contact us first and we'll make the switch fair.

No. The AI models run entirely on your own machine — the same class of vision models cloud services run on their servers, running privately on yours. No account, no upload, and it all works with Wi-Fi off.

Checkout is handled by Lemon Squeezy, our merchant of record. Your license key arrives by email within seconds — paste it into FolioSort's settings and every feature of your tier unlocks instantly. VAT invoices are available from the same email.

There's a 14-day money-back guarantee, no hoops. Email us within 14 days of purchase and you get a full refund.

Not without you seeing it first. Every feature that removes files — Duplicates, Blurry, Screenshots, Merge cleanup — shows you the full selection and waits for your confirmation before anything is applied. Removed files go to the system Trash or a folder you choose; FolioSort never permanently deletes a photo itself. The default Organizer mode is copy, which touches nothing at the source.

You lose no files. FolioSort copies first and only removes a source file after the destination copy has been written and hash-verified. An interrupted run leaves your originals in place — you just run it again, and already-transferred files are recognised and skipped.

Yes — this path is specifically hardened. When moving to a network share or external drive, FolioSort verifies the destination copy by checksum before the source is removed, so a dropped connection can never leave you with zero copies of a photo. If the network fails mid-transfer, the original stays where it was.

Every operation writes an undo record. Undo itself is non-destructive and retryable: if an undo is interrupted, nothing is lost and you can simply run it again. Each feature keeps its own isolated undo history, so undoing a duplicate cleanup can never disturb the results of an organize run.

The design assumes bugs can exist and defends against them. Cleanup features re-verify files immediately before trashing — a duplicate is re-checked to confirm it is still a byte-identical copy of a keeper that still exists at the moment of removal, not just when it was scanned. Symbolic links and folder junctions are guarded during traversal so an operation can never wander outside the folders you selected.

FolioSort verifies it for you: every transferred file is hash-checked against the original, and operations end with a full report of what was moved, copied, skipped and why. Merge writes a keep/skip report for every decision. And because removed files sit in the Trash, you can audit and recover anything before emptying it.

Yes. Canon .cr3, .cr2 and .crw are all supported, with the Pro licence. FolioSort reads the embedded EXIF capture date and GPS directly from the RAW file — it does not need a sidecar or a catalogue.

Yes, with Pro. .braw is handled alongside RED .r3d, ARRI .ari/.arx, Canon Cinema RAW Light .crm and Sony .mxf, so a cinema card can be organised by shoot date like any other media.

Every common photo and video format — JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, WebP, AVIF, JPEG XL, MOV, MP4, AVI, MKV and more. The Free tier is limited by batch size, not by format: RAW and cinema formats are the Pro additions.

Yes — identical. Both builds read from the same format table, so a file that organises on a Mac organises on a Windows PC too. This page is generated from that table, so it cannot claim more than the app actually does.

If it writes DNG — as many drones and phones do — it works today. If it writes a RAW format not on this list, FolioSort will skip the file rather than guess at its metadata. Email feedback@foliosort.app with the extension and it can be added.

The .ts transport-stream extension collides with TypeScript source files, and silently rewriting a developer's source tree is not a risk worth taking. The related .m2t, .mts and .m2ts extensions are supported.

Google Photos stores metadata (original timestamps, GPS, descriptions) in separate .json sidecar files rather than in the image's EXIF data. The image files themselves often retain the export date as their file system timestamp. Tools that don't read these JSON files will see today's date instead of when the photo was taken.

Each photo in a Google Takeout export has a matching .json sidecar file (e.g. IMG_4567.jpg.json) containing the original capture timestamp, GPS coordinates, description, title and other metadata. FolioSort reads these files and merges the data back into the image's EXIF fields.

You need to extract the zip files first. FolioSort then processes the extracted folder, reading both the image files and their JSON sidecars to restore correct metadata before reorganizing.

Yes. Google Takeout often includes duplicates — the same photo appearing in multiple album folders. When the import finishes, its report opens Duplicates, which compares the actual bytes and keeps one copy of each.

Yes. Reading the JSON sidecars, writing the real capture date and GPS back into EXIF, and copying your photos to a clean folder are free with no limit. Pro adds dated folders, People folders and the choice to move instead of copy. Pro is a one-time €29.99, no subscription.

Google Takeout writes the real capture time into a JSON sidecar next to each image — photoTakenTime.timestamp — rather than into the file's EXIF. So most tools fall back to the file's modified date, which is the export date, and every photo appears as taken today. FolioSort reads the sidecar and writes the real date into DateTimeOriginal in EXIF.

In the JSON sidecar's geoData object, not in the image itself. FolioSort extracts the latitude, longitude and altitude and writes them into the GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude and GPSAltitude EXIF tags, so map views in Immich, Apple Photos and Lightroom work again — and FolioSort itself can sort the repaired library into {Country}/{City} folders from those same coordinates.

Yes, as a second step. Takeout exports each photo into a year folder and again into every album it belongs to, so a photo in three albums appears four times. The import repairs every file first. When it finishes, its report opens Duplicates on the result, which compares the actual bytes, flags only real copies and keeps one of each.

It's the small .json file Google exports next to each photo, holding the metadata it removed from the image — including photoTakenTime.timestamp (the precise capture time) and GPS latitude and longitude. FolioSort parses every sidecar and merges those values back into the matching photo's EXIF.

No. Each photo is copied byte for byte and only its metadata is written, such as the date and the location. The image itself is never re-encoded, so the pixels are identical before and after. If a Takeout photo looks softer than you remember, the cause is usually upstream: Google's Storage saver setting compresses photos when they are backed up, and that is the version Takeout exports.

No. The entire Takeout Import runs 100% on your computer — no account, no upload of your library, ever.

No. FolioSort runs entirely on your Mac or PC and writes organized folders to your mounted NAS share (SMB). Indexing is then done by the NAS itself — Synology Photos picks up the year/month folders natively, and Immich mounts the daily folders as an external library.

It sorts your photos and videos by their real capture date into year/month folders — for example 2024/07/ — which is the folder layout Synology Photos indexes natively. Point Synology Photos at the destination folder and your timeline is built from the folder structure FolioSort created.

When the destination is a network share, FolioSort automatically transliterates folder names to plain ASCII (São Paulo becomes Sao Paulo) and strips the characters and endings SMB rejects. That prevents the mysterious skipped or invisible files that otherwise appear when the NAS indexes folders with accented or special characters.

Every copy is hash-verified: FolioSort computes an XXHash64 checksum of the source file and the destination file and only counts the copy as done when they match. If a network hiccup corrupts a transfer, you'll know — nothing silently goes missing.

Free to try — both NAS presets are included and the free version organizes up to 100 files per run. Pro removes the limit. No subscription, no account, and your photos never leave your local network.