When I installed Vista for the first time I scanned through sidebar widgets and found the perfect one to help me keep track of what I downloaded, while also keeping my desktop free of unnecessary stuff. The gadget you need is called The Magic Folder.

The essence of it is that you can set a watched folder, for example your downloads folder for your Firefox, and the gadget will automatically sort the files into other folders based on extension. You can of course drag and drop stuff from your desktop as well. I use the second way, since I still like to see what I have downloaded, but I want to sort if really quickly. I can just drag and drop everything and they will go into the folders I want them to, here’s how:

Head over to The Magic Folder on Windows Live Gallery and download it. You may need to save it first, since I have trouble auto-installing gadgets. Just download it to your desktop and run it and you should be fine. Once you see it in the sidebar click the settings icon and first of all check the “Turn on the Watched folder” setting.

If you are annoyed by the way the icon looks with the bunny (I was), then click on the “Visual” and change the style and color to whatever you need. In the screenshot I have captured a blu, default folder.

Click on the “Folders” and set where you want to sort your files. You can specify a folder for each type you see listed. You can also create new ones using the plus sign. When you are finished setting up your sorting folders click on the extensions tab. Here you can choose an extension, and also choose the location where you want to sort it.

It takes a few minutes to set up, but it’s well worth it, happy sorting!

Filesort is the freeware that I was looking for. Once downloaded and installed (it is only 100k) you simply pick a folder which files you want to sort and define some sorting rules. Filesort offers three different types of rules: File Name Rules, File Age Rules and File Size Rules. Click on new rule to add a new rule in one of the categories. If you wanted to move all mp3 movies you would add *.mp3 in the second tab of the new rule and enter a directory where those files should be placed instead.

Simple and effective. The same rules can be defined for file ages and file size. This could be nice for p2p incoming folders for instance as well. The only thing that bothers me is that you can’t define more than one rule to work together. For instance I could not move all mp3 files that are older than seven days to the new folder. It is either all mp3 files or all files that are older than seven days.

Maybe this will be added to the tool in the future. You may even schedule Filesort that it sorts files automatically every XX minutes.

Thanks to my reader P5chin for this nice tip.