File automation for photographers: RAW, JPG, EXIF

Every shoot ends the same way: a card dump into one folder, hundreds of files, RAW and JPG tangled together, and names like DSC00417.ARW next to DSC00417.JPG. You want to cull the JPGs fast, keep the RAWs safe, and file everything by the day you actually shot it — not the day you happened to copy it off the card. Doing that by hand, every shoot, is the tax you pay for owning a camera.

Elegant File Explorer pays that tax for you. It separates RAW from JPG, reads the real capture date out of each photo, and sorts your library by camera — and every bit of it runs on your own PC, with nothing uploaded.

Split RAW from JPG first#

The first move in any photo workflow is getting the RAWs out of the way so you can cull the JPGs. The recipe “Separate RAW from JPG” recognizes the RAW formats of every major camera — Canon’s CR2 and CR3, Nikon’s NEF, Sony’s ARW, Adobe’s DNG, and more — and moves them into a RAW folder, leaving the JPGs free for a fast first pass.

Here it is as a rule you can read at a glance:

1. Open Auto-organization and click + New rule.
2. Rule name: RAW files.
3. Monitored folders: + Add folder, Browse…, pick your Pictures folder.
4. Which files (conditions): with the tab set to Any (OR), add one “Extension is” condition per RAW format you shoot — .cr3, .nef, .arw, .dng.
5. What to do (actions): “Move to” → your Pictures\RAW folder.

Click “Simulate effect” for the Preview — nothing is actually changed, then “Save rule”. Or skip all of it: the recipe in the Recipe Gallery fills the whole thing in for you.

Sort by the date you actually shot it#

Here is the difference that separates a real photo library from a mess: the capture date. When you copy files off a card, Windows stamps them with today’s date. But every photo carries the true moment it was taken inside it — the camera wrote it there. Elegant File Explorer reads that, so your archive lines up by when the shutter fired, not when you got around to importing.

• “Photos by date taken (EXIF)” reads the real capture date of each photo and files it into Pictures\{capture-year}\{capture-month}, renaming each to a clean, sortable 2026-06-05_name. Shots with no capture data fall back to the file date, so nothing is left behind.
• “Card ingest (photo, video and RAW)” is the full working flow: it takes everything off the card — photos, videos and RAW from any camera — files it into Imports\{year}\{month-name}\{day} and renames each file to 2026-06-05_name, tagged Imported. Chaotic card to professional archive in one pass.
• “Archive past years’ photos (EXIF)” moves shots taken more than a year ago into a Photo archive, split by the year they were taken. Your active library stays light; the past is filed under the right year.

The {capture-date}, {capture-year} and {capture-month} tokens are what make this work — they pull the real shot date, not the copy date. Our full guide to file placeholders walks through every token you can drop into a folder name or a rename.

A folder per camera#

Shoot with two bodies — or a camera and a phone — and you know the pain of a library where everything is jumbled. The recipe “Photo archive by camera (EXIF)” reads the camera model out of each photo and moves it into Pictures\By camera\{camera} — the Canon in one folder, the iPhone in another, the drone in a third. Photos with no camera data stay in By camera itself, in plain sight, so nothing vanishes.

There is also “Rename photos: date + camera”, which renames each file in place to 2026-06-05_Canon EOS R6_name using the capture date and camera model. Professional, traceable file names, without renaming a single one by hand.

The rest of the shoot, handled#

The photo pack has a recipe for the parts of the job that pile up:

• “Separate iPhone HEIC” pulls .heic and .heif files into their own folder, so you know at a glance what needs converting for a client who can’t open them.
• “Phone photos and videos by month” recognizes the classic phone prefixes — IMG_, VID_, PXL_ — and files them into Pictures\Phone by year and month.
• “Mark final exports” finds files with final, export or render in the name, tags them Delivery and gathers them into an Exports folder — the shortcut to the good version when a client asks.
• “Heavy videos in one place” moves clips over 100 MB into a Raw footage folder, keeping the heavyweights out of the way for backup and editing.

Where did that stock photo come from?#

One more signal photographers quietly need: Windows records where each download came from — the site behind it. Almost no program shows it; Elegant File Explorer does. When you pull an image from a stock site, that origin is remembered right alongside the file. A rule using “Downloaded from site (domain)” can file every asset from a given stock library into its own folder, and the {origin} token can stamp the source site into the folder name — which, when a client asks whether an asset is licensed, is the paper trail already built. If you shoot on assignment and juggle references, seeing exactly where each file came from is worth a look.

Nothing is deleted, everything can be undone#

The fear with automating an irreplaceable archive is obvious. Two things answer it. “Simulate effect” shows the full outcome — every move, every rename — before a single file changes. And every run is logged; “Undo” reverses it, because moving is moving, never deleting. Your RAWs are never at risk from a rule you can preview and reverse.