Micro app #2: Download folder sorter

I'm the sort of person who treats their downloads folder as a kind of purgatory for files. It's where things tend to land when they come into my computer, and if they don't have an obvious long-term storage destination, it's often where they live for longer than I'd like to admit. We're talking many months, and over a year in some cases.

Don't judge, we've all got our things.

I know, I know, I should handle this sort of thing better, but I just haven't gotten around to it in 30 years of using a Mac. In the meantime, what I've done is create a simple AppleScript that I can run whenever I want to clean up my downloads folder.

Basically, what it does is go through all of the files and folders in my downloads folder and check when they were added. If it was added in a previous month, it will sort the file or folder into a new folder, still inside the downloads folder, with the year and the month associated with it (ex: 2025-09). Inside those folders, it does further sorting to put images, videos, and music in their own sub-folders, and everything else just sits at the top level of that month.

This certainly doesn't help me with actually solving the underlying problem, but it does make me feel a little better because my downloads folder doesn't look quite as full when I open it. If you're interested in trying it yourself, you can find the script on GitHub.