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Sorting photos by date without touching them one by one

How to organise a grown photo collection by year and month – and what to watch out for with the capture date.

Photos are the special case among files. With a document you search by name; with a photo you almost always search by time: “that was in the summer, when we were in Croatia”. That is why sorting images by date usually makes more sense than sorting them by type.

Date modified is not the capture date

This is the biggest pitfall. An image file carries two different timestamps: the capture date the camera writes into the file’s EXIF data, and the date modified that the file system manages.

As long as a file just sits there, the two are the same. But as soon as you copy it, send it over a messenger or download it from a cloud, the date modified is set to “now”. The capture date in the EXIF data, by contrast, survives.

Check the date before you sort

Before reorganising a large collection, take a sample. Switch Explorer to the details view, right-click the column headers and add “Date taken” next to “Date modified”. If most images show the same value in both columns, you can sort by date modified without worry.

If they differ substantially, write the EXIF data back into the file date first. There are dedicated tools for that; it is a different job from tidying up and should be done with a different program.

Which folder structure works

For photos, year and month as two levels has proven itself – fine enough to find something, coarse enough not to end up with a thousand folders:

2026\03 March\IMG_2048_2026-03-14.jpg

The leading zero in the month is not cosmetic, it is deliberate: without it, Explorer sorts “10 October” before “3 March”. With it, the order is right in every file manager.

Preview first, then move

With photos in particular: file them wrong once and you will search for a very long time. That makes a preview before moving even more important than usual. Zortio shows you the complete list – which file goes into which month folder – before it touches anything. And if the result does not fit, “Undo” brings it all back.