Organize game screenshots and clips on Windows

You hit Win+G, clip the ranked win, take a screenshot of the boss you finally beat — and it all lands in the same folder. Then ShadowPlay drops in a few auto-replays, Medal saves last night’s highlights, and six months later Videos\Captures is a wall of files named after a date and a game you don’t remember playing, quietly eating a hundred gigabytes. Somewhere in there is the clip you actually want to post. Good luck finding it.

Elegant File Explorer sorts the pile for you, on your own PC, with rules you set once and forget. The Gaming & Game captures pack — plus one screenshot recipe from the Essentials — turns that overflowing folder into something you can browse, review and clean out without dread.

Tame the Game Bar folder#

The Windows Game Bar keeps dumping everything into Videos\Captures until the drive fills. The recipe “Game Bar captures by month” watches exactly that folder and files everything in it into Game captures by year and month — the clips and screenshots from each stretch of time kept together, easy to skim and easy to delete when a month’s worth turns out to be junk.

That’s the whole appeal: instead of one bottomless folder, you get Game captures\2026-06, 2026-07, and so on. When you need space, you delete a month you don’t care about, not a random slice of a giant list.

Replays and highlights, dated and findable#

Recording software scatters clips everywhere with cryptic names. “Game replays and highlights” recognizes the replays your capture tools generate — anything with DVR, Replay, ShadowPlay, Medal or Outplayed in the name — and files them into Videos\Replays by year and month, tagged Replay. Your best plays end up dated and easy to find, and the giant video files get out of the way.

If you’d like to see how a rule like that is built, here’s a simple one for screenshots you can read at a glance:

1. Open Auto-organization and click + New rule.
2. Rule name: Screenshots.
3. Monitored folders: + Add folder, Browse…, pick your Pictures folder.
4. Which files (conditions): with the tab on Any (OR), add a “Name contains” condition — Screenshot, Screen Recording.
5. What to do (actions): “Move to” → a Pictures\Screenshots folder.

Click “Simulate effect” for the Preview — nothing is actually changed, then “Save rule” — or take the ready-made recipe below.

Every screenshot in one place#

Screenshots don’t just come from games — they come from everywhere, and they scatter across the machine. The recipe “Round up screenshots” recognizes captures by name (Screenshot, Screen Recording, and their localized equivalents) across your Pictures, Desktop and Downloads, and moves them all into Pictures\Screenshots. That heap of stray shots spread across the PC finally lands in one folder — the game clips, the desktop grabs, all of it.

Back up your saves — before a corrupt file eats 100 hours#

This is the one that spares you real heartbreak. “Game save backups” looks for save files — .sav and .save, including in the subfolders of Documents where most games write them — and makes a copy into Save backups by month. The originals never move, so your games keep working exactly as before; you just quietly build a dated safety net. The day a save corrupts, you have somewhere to roll back to instead of starting over.

Because it copies rather than moves, there’s no risk to the live saves — the game finds its file right where it left it, and you’ve got a spare.

Finding one clip six months later#

The tags these recipes apply — Replay, Save, Recording — aren’t decoration. They turn a folder of thousands into something you can filter. Months from now, when you want the one clutch play to put in a montage, you’re not scrubbing through Videos\Captures by hand; you’re pulling up everything tagged Replay from a given month and finding it in seconds. The dated folders sort your captures; the tags let you cut across them. Together they’re the difference between an archive you use and a heap you’re afraid to open.

Streaming too? The recordings are covered#

If you also stream or record with OBS, the recording side fits the same setup. “OBS & screen recordings by date” recognizes the date-stamped files OBS saves — plus anything named Replay or Recording — and files them into Recordings by year and month, renaming each to 2026-06-05_name, tagged Recording. A clean, chronological archive of your VODs instead of a heap of .mkv files.

The real win: reclaiming disk space#

Game clips and replays are enormous. The reason Videos\Captures sneaks up to a hundred gigabytes is that nothing ever leaves it — you can’t tell the keepers from the junk, so you keep all of it. Once these recipes have sorted everything into dated folders, that decision gets easy: skim a month, keep the two clips worth keeping, delete the rest. If your drive is genuinely full, freeing space without deleting anything you’ll miss is the natural next step. And the {year} and {month} tokens the recipes use to build those folders are worth knowing — our guide to file placeholders covers them all.

Nothing is deleted, everything can be undone#

Pointing an automation at your captures and saves is a fair thing to hesitate over. Two features settle it. “Simulate effect” shows the full outcome — every move, copy and rename — before a single file changes. And every run is logged, so “Undo” reverses it. The save backup recipe copies, so your live saves never even move; and where a rule does move a file, moving is moving, never deleting. Preview each recipe first, reverse it after if it wasn’t what you wanted.