File automation recipes: a tour of 26 packs

Most people meet automation one rule at a time — they fix the Downloads folder, then months later think to file their invoices. But the Recipe Gallery inside Elegant File Explorer isn’t a handful of rules; it’s 26 themed packs, each a small collection of ready-made recipes aimed at one kind of mess. A recipe is a rule with its trigger, conditions and actions already filled in — you pick it, preview it, and it runs.

This post is the map of that gallery. Not a recipe-by-recipe manual — the niche guides linked below do that — but a tour of all 26 packs so you can see the whole territory at once and find the two or three that are clearly about your life. Every recipe, whichever pack it’s in, runs the same safe way: a full preview before anything moves, and a one-click undo after.

The everyday core#

Two packs cover the mess almost every PC has, no matter who you are.

Everyday essentials is the cleanup everyone needs: sorting a chaotic Downloads folder by type, clearing the Desktop, rounding up scattered screenshots, and putting Downloads on autopilot so the mess stops forming. Reclaim space goes after the disk hogs — old installers, forgotten ISOs and disk images, oversized photos, giant files that haven’t changed in months — and sets them safely aside for review rather than deleting anything. If you only ever touch these two, you’ve solved most of the clutter. Several of their recipes appear in our sampler, 12 ready-made recipes that kill 90% of digital clutter.

Your documents and your life#

Documents & Life is for the paperwork of being a person: gathering loose PDFs, rounding up scanned documents by month, building an e-book library, corralling personal documents and the papers of your home. The household side of it gets its own walkthrough in organize your household documents. Student & Education does the same for a semester — lectures, assignments, exams and papers filed so the term doesn’t turn into one giant folder.

The clever ones: content and origin#

Two packs read things a normal file manager can’t see.

Inside the file is the standout: recipes that read the text inside a document — PDF (even scanned, thanks to built-in OCR that runs 100% on your PC), DOCX and TXT — and file it by what’s written on the page, not by its name. That’s how a photographed invoice named scan0007.pdf still lands in the right folder; the mechanics are in search text in a scanned PDF. Organize by origin uses a different quiet fact: Windows records the site each download came from, and these recipes file by that stamp — the bank statement to the bank’s folder, the WhatsApp file to its own place — so origin, not the filename, does the sorting. More on that in where did this file come from.

Money and the self-employed#

Freelancer & Finance is the pack for anyone who invoices: it files invoices, bills, receipts and contracts on their own, so tax time stops being an archaeology dig. It pairs naturally with the accountant’s view in file automation for accountants.

For people who make things#

Seven packs are built for creative and media work, each around the real files those tools spit out:

• Photo & Video — the shooter’s flow from card to sorted library.
• Adobe & Creative — Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects fonts, exports and auto-saves put in their place.
• Audio & Music — renders, samples and project backups for FL Studio, Ableton, Reaper and friends; deeper in organize music samples and recordings.
• Recordings & Streaming — OBS, Zoom and Teams captures sorted by date.
• Drone & Action Cam — DJI and GoPro footage organized and renamed by capture date.
• Design & UI/UX — Figma, Sketch, XD, icons and screen exports where they belong; see organize design files by client.
• Gaming & Game captures — Game Bar clips, replays and save backups, so no great play gets lost; more in organize game screenshots and clips.

For technical work#

Five packs aim at code, engineering and business files:

• Developer — reclaim space from projects without touching what’s in use; walkthrough in organize developer downloads.
• DevOps & Data — database dumps, server logs, and isolating secrets like .env files.
• CAD & Engineering — sweep the .bak and .sv$ files and organize sheets and plots.
• Office & Work — spreadsheets, decks, reports and the cleanup of Office’s temporary files.
• Online Store & Sales — labels, orders, product photos and store reports on autopilot.

For professions on a deadline#

Two packs are shaped around jobs where a missed date has consequences. Legal & Law organizes cases, contracts and filings and can attach a deadline reminder; Health & Clinics sorts exams, images and prescriptions per patient and can remind you of a follow-up. Both lean on the same content-reading and reminder actions as the rest of the app, aimed at a specific kind of workday.

Recipes shaped by where you live#

Paperwork is local, so five packs trigger on the words of a specific market. Accounting handles Brazilian NF-e XML, SPED and tax slips by period; USA: Taxes & Paperwork files W-2, 1099, statements and receipts; United Kingdom: HMRC & Bills covers Self Assessment, payslips, P60 and household bills; Spain: AEAT & Paperwork sorts AEAT forms, payslips and invoices; and Latin America: SAT & AFIP files Mexico’s CFDI, Argentina’s AFIP documents and payslips. The gallery shows the worldwide packs plus the ones for your language and region by default, so you’re not scrolling past paperwork from a country you don’t live in.

How a pack becomes a working rule#

Turning any recipe on is the same short flow, whichever pack it came from:

In practice: open Auto-organization, click + New rule, and the wizard opens on Step 0 — “How about starting from a ready-made recipe?” Choose your pack in the Recipe Gallery and pick a recipe; it fills in the folders, conditions and actions for you. Click “Simulate effect” to see the exact preview — nothing is changed yet — and, once you’re happy, “Save rule”. Real-time recipes then run on their own; the rest you trigger with “Run now”, and “Undo” reverses any run. That safety net is why you can browse 26 packs without fear: nothing here acts blind. If seeing-before-applying is the part you want to trust, preview before organizing, undo after is the piece to read.

This is the map, not the territory#

Twenty-six packs is a lot to scan, and that’s the point of a hub like this: you don’t need all of them. Find the two or three that describe your actual life — the everyday core plus, say, the finance pack, or the design pack, or your country’s paperwork — turn those on, and leave the rest for when a new mess appears. Each recipe you activate becomes a normal rule you can adjust, so the gallery is a starting point, never a cage. When you’re ready to go deep on one, the niche guides — from file automation for photographers to organize teaching materials — pick up exactly where this map leaves off.