12 ready-made recipes that kill 90% of digital clutter

These 12 ready-made recipes cover most of the digital clutter on an ordinary PC — a jammed Downloads folder, scattered screenshots, photos with no order, documents with useless names. Each one is an automation rule already built: you pick it from the gallery, watch the simulation, and apply. No setting anything up from scratch.

A recipe here is a rule template: trigger, conditions, and actions ready to go, with a destination and an organization that make sense. All of them run with a simulation first and undo afterward — the safety rule applies to all twelve. Below, what each does and who it’s for.

Taming Downloads#

1. Organize Downloads by type

Creates subfolders by type — Images, Documents, Videos, Audio, Archives, and Others — and drops each file into its own. The messiest folder on your PC, fixed in one click. For anyone whose Downloads becomes a dumping ground every week.

2. Downloads on autopilot

The “set it and forget it” version: watches Downloads in real time and, the moment a file finishes downloading, files it into its type’s subfolder. The mess simply stops forming. For anyone tired of tidying the folder by hand.

Safe cleanup (nothing deleted without you seeing it)#

3. Round up screenshots

Recognizes screenshots by name (Screenshot, screen recordings) across Downloads, the Desktop, and Pictures, and moves them all into a “Captures” folder. For anyone who screenshots constantly and never finds one again.

4. Clean up dead downloads

Finds the corpses of interrupted downloads — .crdownload, .part, .partial — sitting for more than 3 days and sends them to the Recycle Bin. They’re useless by definition, and the Bin still lets you recover them. For everyone — browsers always leave leftovers.

5. Hunt down old installers

Finds .exe and .msi files downloaded more than 30 days ago and moves them to a review folder with the “Review” tag — it deletes nothing. You check and reclaim space safely. For everyone, because Downloads is always full of setups you already installed.

Documents in their place#

6. Gather loose PDFs

Collects the PDFs scattered around the folder and pulls them into Documents/PDFs, already tagged “PDF.” Simple and effective. For anyone who receives PDFs all day and loses track of them.

7. Contracts by content (PDF and DOCX)

Reads the text of PDFs and DOCX and recognizes the anatomy of a contract — “between the parties,” “hereinafter,” “clause” — filing them into Documents/Contracts with the “Contract” tag. It even catches the draft that became final doc OK.docx. For anyone who signs and files contracts and doesn’t want to depend on the file name.

Photos with real order#

8. Separate RAW from JPG

Recognizes the RAW formats of major cameras (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG…) and moves them into a “RAW” folder, leaving the JPGs free for quick culling. The first step of every professional photo workflow. For photographers shooting RAW + JPG.

9. Library by camera

Reads the camera each photo quietly records and creates a folder per camera — Canon in one, iPhone in another, drone in another. That’s the real gear, not what the file name claims. For anyone shooting with more than one body (or camera + phone).

By origin: every file tells where it came from#

10. Downloads by source site

Windows quietly remembers where each download came from; this recipe uses that to create a folder per site and move each file into its source’s folder — the statement to the bank’s folder, the receipt to the store’s. It only touches files that remember where they came from. For anyone who downloads files and later can’t recall where they got them.

11. Received from the cloud (Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer)

Recognizes everything that came from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, WeTransfer, or MEGA and moves it into Documents/Shared with me, tagged “Shared.” It’s the answer to “where’s that file someone sent me by link?” For anyone who gets files by link every week.

12. Files from WhatsApp Web

Everything you download from WhatsApp Web remembers it came from web.whatsapp.com. The recipe spots that and stores those files in Documents/WhatsApp by year and month, tagged “WhatsApp” — the proof a client sent in a group chat no longer mixes with everything else. For anyone who works receiving files over WhatsApp, which is half the world.

How to activate a recipe#

Turning any of them on takes less than a minute:

1. Open Auto-organization and click + New rule. Right at the start, the wizard asks: “How about starting from a ready-made recipe?” — that’s Step 0.
2. In the Recipe Gallery, pick the recipe you want. It fills in the whole rule for you — folders, conditions, and actions already in place.
3. Click “Simulate effect”. You see the Preview — nothing is actually changed — with the exact map of what would happen and how many files would be touched.
4. Happy with it? Click “Save rule”. Real-time recipes start organizing on their own; the rest you trigger whenever you like with “Run now”. And if something came out wrong, “Undo” puts it all back in one click.

One detail: the gallery shows worldwide recipes plus the ones for your language and region, and marks which are premium. Several of the twelve above — Downloads by type, screenshots, dead downloads, old installers, loose PDFs — are among the free ones.

Make the recipe your own#

Every rule created from a recipe is a normal rule — the same triggers, conditions and actions as any other. The gallery is a starting point, not a straitjacket:

• Change the destination. Prefer D:\Archive over Documents? Edit the destination before saving — placeholders like {year} and {month-name} still apply.
• Tighten the filter. Add a condition with + condition — a “Size greater than (KB)” on the installer recipe, say, to hunt only the big ones.
• Change the pace. Did the recipe come as manual? After a few clean runs, switch When to run to “Automatically, when a file arrives (real time)” and put it on autopilot.

The golden rule stands: if you touched the recipe, “Simulate effect” before you save.