“Please move all of the media files in my home folder into the /home/me/media folder”

AI: moves the assets from all of your video games into one folder

i can imagine this would speed up distrohopping by 10x

I am confusion. It seems like this wouldn’t help much with distro-hopping at all. At least not the way I learned to reinstall OSes, i.e. keep /home and make sure to back up important config files you edited.

Every single file on my computer is saved under ~/Downloads why would I want to sort it somewhere else when I already know exactly where it is?

Such AI can be coded in <100 lines shell script. One of simplest implementations:

#!/bin/bash

find . -type f -print0 | while IFS= read -d $'\0' f; do 
  type=$(file --mime-type --brief -- "$f")
  mkdir -p "$type"
  mv -- "$f" "${type}/"
done

Does this “obviously” have to use AI? I can see a tool that sorts files into folders based on file extensions, modification dates and/or metadata could get the work done.

And if organising files by content (e.g. “my zoo trip”, “meetings with Xenia”) is that important, doing it manually seems like a better idea because accuracy is presumably important.

I don’t really see the distro hopping argument either. Even if you don’t share your home directory between installs, presumably you copy over your files as directories rather than individually pouring them into one super folder?

This requires no “AI”, just some simple rule-based automation, at most some algorithmic sorting.

• Android (or some custom branded Android versions?) automatically save downloaded files in folders by Pictures, Documents, etc unless you tell them.not to.
• Office365 offers the PowerAutomate function, but knowing Microsoft they probably overcomplicated things a bunch. [Edit: obviously this isn’t FLOSS, just a hint at what to look for alternatives to…]

This approach never appealed to me as I want to know where things are rather than where some subroutine thinks it belongs, but I’m certain you will find plenty of software that offers an auto sorting feature.

Maybe organize-tool would help? You have to set the parameters but I love it for getting my home folders organized.

Maybe you’re looking for Multimodal RAG ?

Lately I’ve been using chatGPT to create a bunch of small custom python programs to do stuff like this (if I can’t easily find an existing program to do what I want).

For example I would tell it something like:

Create a python program that does the following:

-asks the user for a directory to process

-sorts the files in that folder according to file type, placing them into appropriately named sub-folders, eg all image files into a folder named "images", all music files into "music" and so on.

-creates any new sub folders before moving the files

-moves the files verbosely

-gives the user a notification upon finishing

You can customize it to do exactly what you want, and it takes only seconds for it to give you the code.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much time it’s saved me over the last few weeks, automating simple stuff that would normally take ages.