What's new

Make subfolders from inside the app, on any place. New place now asks for the name and puts the shots straight in it.

If you use the zip: unpack it and run LocationSorter.exe as before. Nothing in your libraries or shelf changes format.

Subfolders (zip and Store)

• Pick shots and choose Subfolder… on the strip's bar. Pick a subfolder the place already has, or type a new name and press Enter. In the full-size view, U does the same for the shot on screen.
• It works on any place: in a library made from folders you already had, in a library the app sorted, and on card shots that aren't in a library yet.
• Nothing moves until Apply. A new subfolder shows as a dashed tab while it waits, and the preview says what will happen ("4 between subfolders", "into Kitchen"). Discard and Ctrl+Z take it back, and Undo after an Apply puts the files back.
• Directly in … at the end of the list puts shots back beside the subfolders. A subfolder that Apply leaves empty is removed from disk if nothing else is in it.
• A shot moved to another place lands at the top of that place, not in a subfolder.
• Subfolders are read from your folders, so they survive a reopen, a rescan and a rename of their place.
• Not in this version: renaming a subfolder from its tab, empty tabs, dragging shots onto a tab, and typing a nested path (a/b becomes ab).

New place asks for the name (zip and Store)

• New place… on a strip's bar, and in the full-size view's M list, now asks what the place is called, and the shots go straight into it.
• This fixes a bug. If none of the shots had GPS and no name was typed, the new place vanished at once and the shots landed in No place, while the app said "Moved 2 shots". You then had to pick them again in No place and name them there. It affected anyone using this button on shots without GPS, ever since the button arrived.
• With no GPS, the name is required. With GPS, you can leave it empty and the app suggests a name from where the shots were taken, as before. Cancel keeps your picks.

Subfolders flattened by a rename, fixed (zip and Store)

• Renaming a place in a library the app sorted, then applying, flattened any subfolder you had made inside it by hand and rescanned: Piraeus/kitchen/A_1.jpg ended up as Renamed/A_1.jpg, with an empty Piraeus/kitchen left behind. No photograph was lost. It affected only sorted libraries with such subfolders; libraries made from folders you already had kept theirs. The subfolder now moves with its place.

Known limits

• Undo twice with no Apply between, after renaming a place and moving a shot out of it: the second Undo can refuse the rename. It says so and loses nothing, and a rescan shows any folder left behind.
• Undo after renaming a place in a sorted library goes back one step, and the library then closes with its shots still inside it.

Right-click a folder to open it, choose where every report and export goes, and send a shot back to No place.

If you use the zip: unpack it and run LocationSorter.exe as before. Nothing in your libraries or shelf changes format.

Right-click a folder (Store version)

• Open in Location Sorter is on the right-click menu of a folder in File Explorer. Select one folder and it opens, or hands over to the copy that is already running. With several folders selected the entry doesn't show. The zip has no such entry; drag the folder onto the window, or use Browse.

Choose where it goes (the app window: zip and Store)

• Reports, place lists and sun copies now open Windows' Save As. Choose the folder and the name, and Windows asks before replacing a file. The dialog comes first, before a report that can take minutes to build.
• A draft report remembers the folder you chose, so the draft panel no longer has a folder row of its own.
• A sun copy can't replace the photograph it was made from, or any shot in what you have open, and a place list can't replace a library's _manifest.csv: the app says so and the file stays as it was.
• A locked file, such as a place list open in Excel, gets a sentence naming the file instead of a failed save.
• Running in a browser instead of the window works as it did.

Back to No place (zip and Store)

• Move to… now ends with a No place row, on a strip's bar, on the map's selection, and in the full-size view's M list. Apply moves the files to _Unsorted, and a geotagged shot keeps its pin on the map, ready to lasso into the right place. Ctrl+Z takes it back until you apply.
• Type a new place's name in those lists and Enter still makes that place. The row steps aside unless what you typed spells "no place" (at least "no p").
• A place that loses all its geotagged shots goes, unless it has a name. With a name it stays for as long as any shot is in it; with nothing in it, it goes, and Ctrl+Z brings it back.

Bringing your libraries over from the zip (Store version)

• The one-time note saying your libraries came across could be lost if a second launch asked first. It now reaches the page.
• Errors while bringing things over were lost in the window version. They now reach the log.
• From this version on, if your shelf or report drafts fail to come across, the next start tries again and merges them with what the Store version already has. What it already has wins. A failure on 1.16.0 was not recorded, so it can't be retried.

A freeze, fixed (zip and Store)

• A second folder sent to the app in the first seconds after it started could freeze the window for good, with nothing but Task Manager to end it. It could happen from 1.14.0 on, and the right-click entry makes it easier to reach.

Known limits

• Windows 10: the app supports it, but the right-click entry has only been tested on Windows 11 and may not appear.
• Windows on Arm: the right-click entry is built for x64 and has not been tried there.
• Zip open beside the Store version: the right-click opens a second window, because they are separate apps.
• Drive roots: the entry is for folders and isn't expected on a drive.
• Running the zip and the Store version on the same PC at the same time gives two separate shelves.
• Started from a terminal through locationsorter, the Store version writes no log file.

Location Sorter is now in the Microsoft Store: apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N4H88NH2W2K. And its local server only listens to the app itself.

The Store version is €24.99 and installs and updates itself. This zip stays free.

If you use the zip: unpack it and run LocationSorter.exe as before. Nothing in your libraries or shelf changes format, and a build from 1.15.0 opens them as they were.

Safer local server (zip and Store)

• The app's server now refuses requests that do not come from its own page. Before, a web page open in your browser could ask the app to open a folder or to quit (the limit 1.14.0 listed). Requests must now name the app's own address and port, and a browser request from any other site is turned away. A second launch handing over its folder still works.

Maps and place names (zip and Store)

• The app now introduces itself to OpenStreetMap by name, version and a contact page, as OSM's usage policy asks, for both the maps and the place names.
• Maps load from OSM's main tile address instead of the old a./b./c. servers.

Content search never goes online in a built app (zip and Store)

• A built app loads its search model only from the copy it ships with, and never contacts the model's download site, even if loading goes wrong.

The Microsoft Store version

• Same app, installed and updated by the Store. No "unknown publisher" warning, and updates arrive on their own. Get it at apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N4H88NH2W2K.
• Your libraries come with you. The first time the Store version starts on a PC that already ran the zip, it brings over your libraries, report drafts, route, place names, window size and search index, once, and says so. After that the two versions keep separate lists. Settings kept by the page itself start fresh: the theme and frame, the default destination folder, sun calibrations, and the rail, shelf and report preferences.
• Open with: right-click a photo → Open with → Location Sorter opens its folder. In a terminal, locationsorter "C:\folder" opens a folder.
• Uninstalling the Store version removes its list of libraries and report drafts. Your photo folders, and the library information kept inside them, are untouched.

Known limits

• There is no right-click "Open in Location Sorter" on folders; drag the folder onto the window, or use Browse.
• Running the zip and the Store version on the same PC at the same time gives two separate shelves.
• Started from a terminal through locationsorter, the Store version writes no log file.

Location Sorter now looks and behaves like an app instead of a web page in a window. The screens, the files and what the app does are the same; what changes is the frame around them, where the settings live, how you find a command, and the words it uses.

If you use the zip: unpack it and run LocationSorter.exe as before. Nothing in your libraries changes format. A library made by an earlier version opens in this one exactly as it was, and one made or edited here opens in 1.14.0 again.

A frame that says where you are

• An app bar along the top, on every screen: Libraries, All places (every place in every library on one map), Reports, a search of every library, Settings (⚙) and Help (?). The tagline and the row of small symbols are gone.
• Inside a library, a second bar: a breadcrumb back to Libraries (← Libraries / Test Library), the Gallery | Map switch, the filter, Duplicates and Actions — a labelled button where the ⋯ was, with the same menu and the same line under each item.
• A status bar along the foot: what you are looking at (shots, how many have GPS, places), the library's folder, and the Duplicates scan's progress, which used to sit inside its button.
• Maps use all the room there is, edge to edge between the bars at any window size, instead of a box with empty space around it.

Settings, Help and a command palette

• Settings (⚙, or Ctrl+,) holds what used to be symbols: Theme — match this computer, light or dark — and Thumbnails — small, medium or large — each shown as a picture of what it does. Your earlier choices are kept. About is a quiet block at the foot, and in the window build so is Quit.
• Help (?, or F1) opens a short menu: How it works, Keyboard shortcuts, About.
• Ctrl+K opens a command palette. Type what you want — dark, tidy, map, a library's name — and press Enter. It lists where you can go, your recent libraries, the theme and thumbnail choices and every item of the Actions menu that is available right now, so it never offers what the menu would refuse. Anything that asks are you sure? still asks.

Reports are a panel, not a place you have to go to

• Reports opens beside whatever you are looking at — Libraries, the All places map, inside any library, in the Gallery or on its Map — and never takes you away from it or asks anything. The button shows how many places the current report holds.
• Drag a place onto the panel to add it — from the rail, a place's band or a search result. A place already in the report says so rather than being added twice.
• It pushes the page over when the window is wide enough and floats above it when it is not; drag its edge to resize it, Expand to write in comfort. R opens and closes it from the keyboard.
• It keeps its place. The report you had open, how far you had scrolled and the cursor in your line are all where you left them when you open a library, switch between Gallery and Map, or go back to Libraries.

One vocabulary

The app used to say location, card, shelf, sheets and doors for the same few things. Now it says:

"Shots" stays, and is explained once, on the first-run screen. The README and its screenshots, Help, the dialogs and the messages follow it. Names the files on disk use (locations in _library.json, the location column in _manifest.csv) are data and are not renamed, which is why older and newer versions read each other's libraries.

Smaller changes

• Every bar, menu, panel, dialog, tab and toast was measured and made to agree: one control height in a row, one set of radii and shadows, text centred in its control, focus and hover states that match, and no overlapping or clipped text at 1600, 1920, 2560 and 880 pixels wide, in light and dark.
• Tab stays inside Settings and Help while they are open, and closing either puts the focus back on the button that opened it.
• A library's Duplicates progress, the N shots · M with GPS line and the path moved to the status bar; the page footer is gone (its version and credit are in Settings → About).
• The first-run steps, the report picker and the saved-work question use the same words as everywhere else.

Known limits

• The scout report's own heading, and its default file name, still say Location scout report: that is the name of the document a director is handed, not the app's word for a group of shots. Say if you would rather it read Scout report.
• Quit is in Settings and shows only in the window build; run from source, the terminal is the way out.
• Reports is disabled, with a note, only while there are no libraries at all.
• The app's local server still has no check on where a request comes from, so a web page open in your browser could ask it to open a folder or quit. It can not write or move files through this. A proper check is planned.

Location Sorter now runs as one copy, and it opens a folder you give it. Start it twice and the second start brings the first window forward instead of opening another. Hand it a folder, or some photos, and it opens them.

If you use the zip: unpack it and run LocationSorter.exe as before. Nothing in your libraries or shelf changes format, and a build from 1.13.0 opens them as they were.

One running copy (Windows)

• Starting the app while it is already running brings the running window forward and the new start exits. If the window was minimized, it is restored. This used to leave two copies on the same library.
• Double-clicking twice while it is still starting up is covered too. The second start waits for the first to finish loading, then hands over, rather than opening a second copy.
• A crashed or killed copy never blocks a start. The leftover file it leaves behind is checked and ignored, so the app simply starts.
• From source, and with SORTER_MULTI=1, you still get separate copies. The packaged app is the one that behaves as a single copy.

Open a folder or photos from the command line

• LocationSorter.exe "C:\Photos\Trip" opens that folder. So does dragging a folder onto the exe, or onto a shortcut to it.
• Photos work too. Hand it one photo or several and it opens their folder; with a library open, only those photos are offered.
• It follows the same rules as dropping onto the window. On the start screen the folder opens; with a library open it asks Add these photos to “Houses”?; while a sort is running or a question is open it says why it can't, and nothing happens.
• Starting it with a folder while it is already running hands the folder to the running copy and brings its window forward.
• In the browser (no window), a second start opens a new tab on the running copy.

Quitting

• /api/quit now closes the window. It answered OK before, but in the window the app stayed open.

Known limits

• Bringing the window forward depends on Windows allowing it. If Windows refuses, the taskbar button flashes instead.
• Several folders launched in quick succession during startup keep only the latest one.
• A folder on a network drive that is offline can take longer than the hand-over waits, and may open a second copy.
• With two browser tabs open on the app, both can react to the same hand-over.
• macOS still opens in your browser. The hand-over is built in there (a second start opens a new tab on the running copy), but it is untested on a Mac, and the wait for a copy that is still starting is Windows only.
• The app's local server still has no check on where a request comes from, so a web page open in your browser could ask it to open a folder or quit. It can not write or move files through this. A proper check is planned.

Location Sorter now opens in a window of its own on Windows, and you can drag a folder or photos onto it to open or add them. Until now it lived in a browser tab, which is why it had a power button, a heartbeat and a habit of being left running behind your back.

If you use the zip: unpack it and run LocationSorter.exe as before. Nothing in your libraries or shelf changes format, and a build from 1.12.0 opens them as they were.

Its own window (Windows)

• Closing the window quits the app. There is no browser tab, no power button and nothing left running afterwards.
• It remembers where you left it: size, position, and whether it was maximized. If the screen you used is no longer there, it opens centred on the one that is. Snap it to the top edge to maximize, close it, and un-maximize next time: it goes back to where you had it before the snap.
• You can't lose typing by closing it. A note or a report draft you were still typing is saved first.
• Closing during a sort is refused until the sort finishes, with a message saying why. Half-filed photographs are worse than waiting.
• The folder pickers are Windows' own.
• If the window can't start, for example on a PC without Microsoft's WebView2 runtime (it comes with Windows 11 and updated Windows 10), the app tells you why in its log and opens in your browser instead, as it always did.
• The window keeps its own settings, apart from your browser's, so the first time you open it the theme, layout and last destination start fresh. They are remembered from then on.
• macOS is unchanged. It still opens in your browser; the window is Windows only for now.

Drag a folder or photos onto the window

Drop onto the window and it does the right thing for where you are:

• On the start screen: a library opens; a folder of libraries lists them; a folder of loose photographs or a camera card (DCIM) loads as a card to sort; folders you made by hand ask Keep these folders as they are? first, as they always do. A single photo, or several from one folder, opens that folder.
• With a library open: it adds to the library (see the next section).
• Anything else (a card already loaded, a sort running, a question or panel open) says why it can't, and nothing happens. A drop never discards work.
• A veil tells you before you let go. Drop a folder or photos to open them on the start screen, Drop photos or a folder to add them to “Houses” inside a library, and a quieter message when a drop would be refused.
• Two folders at once, or photos from different folders, say Drop one folder at a time. Dropping a whole drive tells you to drop the DCIM folder instead.
• The yes/no questions no longer close when you click the dimmed area around them. Click the window to bring it to the front after a drop and the question stays. Cancel and Esc still work. (Only in the window; other panels still close on an outside click.)

Dropping into a library asks first, and says where things went

Adding photos to a library used to be automatic and silent: they were grouped by where they were taken, joined the nearest place or started a new one named from the address, and the app said only Added 12 shots. It looked random.

• A question first. Add these photos to “Houses”? with Add by location (what used to happen), Choose where…, and Cancel.
• Choose where… opens the same place picker as Move to…. Pick a place, or New place…, and the photos go there. Nothing is left as a pending change, so Discard and Ctrl+Z don't pull them out into a place made behind your back.
• Only what you dropped is added. One photo adds that photo. Several add those. A folder adds the folder.
• The message says where they went: Added 12 photos: 9 joined “Nikis 48”, 3 started a new place. A new place is named from its address once that is known, and is never shown as a placeholder. The Add shots button says it too.
• Take them out stays on the message, and a message from an earlier drop never appears over a different library or hides a button you can still use.

Known limits

• A real drag from Explorer is checked by hand, not by the test suite.
• Window memory on screens set above 100% scaling, and on a laptop plus an external monitor at a different scale, hasn't been tried on every machine.
• Dragging a link from a browser onto the window opens it in the window.
• Two copies of the app can still be opened on the same library.
• Closing the window is refused during a sort, which also holds up a Windows sign-out until the sort ends.
• Dropping a folder that mixes a camera-named folder with named folders loads it as a card without the Keep these folders… question.

This is the release the 1.12.0 betas were leading to. Location Sorter has only ever sorted a fresh card of shots into folders it makes. It can now also adopt folders you already built by hand — years of jobs, one folder per address — and carry them the rest of the way: find where each place is, tidy the names, put the positions into the photographs, search them, and send a director a report of just the places that fit the brief.

Everything below was used on a real 47-house folder through seven betas. If you ran a beta, this is beta.7 plus the version number; nothing else changed.

Use folders you already have

The shelf has a third button, Use folders I already have…, beside Sort a folder of shots… and Open libraries…. Point it at a folder with one folder per place and it lists what it found — nothing is written until you press Adopt, and nothing is ever moved or renamed.

• A tick on every folder, and on every subfolder. Leave out ONLY AS REFERENCE. Tick "Its 21 subfolders are separate places" where one folder holds several places rather than the rooms of one, and leave out the odd subfolder of those. A cover photograph shows what each folder is.
• Sorting a card into hand-built folders asks first. Keep my folders · Regroup by GPS · Cancel — it used to regroup 47 houses into 16 clusters without a word.
• A place's subfolders become buttons over its strip — All · 1.ENTRANCE 30 · 2. INTERIOR 40 · Loose 3 — read from where the shots sit, stored nowhere.
• An adopted library is never renamed. Rename every shot is not offered there. Drop moves a file to _Dropped inside the library folder; nothing is deleted.

Giving each place a position

Most hand-built folders have no GPS in their shots, and Kolonaki AIM AVAIL TBC 1st Flr is not an address.

• A position is suggested from the folder name and reads as a suggestion: drawn differently, and it never collects a new card's shots until you have confirmed it. On 15 folders whose answer I knew, the guess landed within 250 m on 8 — worth a look every time, not worth trusting blind.
• Go through them runs one dialog after another — a photograph of the place, the candidate addresses, Street View here ↗, Confirm & next, Skip. Placing, confirming and going back to GPS are undo steps.
• An answer far from the rest of the library is never the highlighted one, and choosing it takes two presses.
• Finding positions runs in the background with a progress chip, a time left, and a Stop. A lookup you type goes ahead of the batch, and a pass never overwrites a pin you placed.
• The map says what it is not showing: places with no position are hollow dots in the list, and Where is …? opens when you click one.
• Tidy names pulls AVAIL, TBC, 1st Flr out into tags and a phone number into the note, fixes capitals and underscores, and never swaps your name for an address. Nothing changes until you tick it, and the new name is a field you can type over.

Write positions into the photographs

Write positions into photos… puts a confirmed position into the photograph's own EXIF, so it travels with the file. Only photos with no GPS are touched — a camera's real fix is never overwritten. It is lossless (no re-save, no pixel touched), counts everything before it writes, and Remove written places takes back exactly what it added.

Several jobs in one report

• The scout report lists every place, all ticked; untick the dead ends, choose Highlights or Every shot.
• Reports collects places from any number of libraries: + Report on a place, a search result or a map pin. Put them in order, group them under scene headings (Kitchen, Alley), write a line for each saying why it fits. A place added from a search leads with the shots that matched.
• The written file is still one self-contained page that emails cleanly: a cover map, an index by scene, a divider page per scene. The Reports panel is a drawer down the side of the window, with its own search box for adding places.
• Export places as CSV or KML — for a spreadsheet or Google My Maps — from a report or ⋯ → Export places…. Greek stays Greek.

Finding things

• Typing a place's name finds that place first. Ellis no longer drags in Mellisia; looser matches, including shots found only by what is in the picture, wait behind +N looser.
• Shelf search shows one card per place, with +5 more here to open it. + Route and + Report are always visible under each card.
• Right-click a place on a library's own map for Add to route, Add to report, Show in Sheets, Select its shots and Where is it…?.
• Rail order: Most · Route · A–Z, with numbers in natural order and Greek sorted properly.

Moving, undoing, and not letting wrong data in

• One Move to… picker everywhere. Type to narrow; Latin letters find Greek names.
• Undo says what it undid, and Redo exists (Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y; the ⋯ menu names it).
• Add shots leaves out what the library already holds, compared by content, not by name — a card of copies used to write 79 _2.jpg files. Leave out the N new shots takes back a batch from the Apply preview.
• Apply tells moves from new shots: "1 moved in from Lelas Karagianni 55."
• Every library card has a ⋯ menu: Remove from shelf touches nothing; sending the folder to the Recycle Bin is a separate, later item.
• Put shots back says how many first; deleting a library counts what is on disk.

Duplicates and the viewer

• Exact copies get their own section — Keep one of each, drop 12 — read whole, not guessed. The shot that will stay is ringed before you click, and each shot says which place and subfolder it lives in.
• An info panel in the viewer (press I): camera, lens, exposure, pixel size, when and where, which way it pointed, the file's full path, Copy path and Show in folder.
• The sun arc can dock below the photo (⇩ dock below), with a key to which arc is which.
• iPhone HEIC photos are read, and clips play in adopted libraries. ffmpeg ships inside the app, so a fresh install shows a clip's own frame.

A card you can leave and come back to

Your grouping, names, notes, tags, drops and stars on a card are saved as you go (in the app's own folder, never your photo folder). Load the same card again and it asks: Pick up where you left off? Only for the same card — if files have been added or removed it starts fresh rather than put names on the wrong shots. A new card's shots near a place you have already named are suggested under your name for it.

One word: "place"

The app said location, place and folder for the same thing. It says place everywhere now, and what a place can be missing is a position. The product's name and the report's Location scout report heading are unchanged.

Before you start

• Your libraries open as before. A library the app sorted in the ordinary way is still the format it always was; none of this is visible to an older build.
• An adopted library is a newer format, and older builds refuse it. Adopted libraries are format 4; leaving a top-level folder out makes 5; leaving a subfolder out makes 6. 1.11.3 and 1.12.0 refuse a newer library with a clear message and touch nothing. 1.11.2 and earlier do not: they read it as damaged, rebuild it from the manifest — which for an adopted folder is empty — and the next save overwrites the real one. Do not open an adopted library with a build older than 1.11.3.
• Adoption never renames or moves a file, but it does write a _library.json into the folder. If you would rather not, adopt a copy.
• Photos with a hand-typed GPS (Lightroom, exiftool — anything that writes GPSProcessingMethod: MANUAL) are read as a position someone chose, not one a camera measured. They no longer group into a place on their own; they land in No place for you to put where they belong. Coordinates your camera or phone recorded are unaffected.
• A photo you moved into a subfolder of its own place is no longer treated as gone at the next rescan; it stays where it is and is offered back. Two places whose names differ only in case (Adams, ADAMS) get separate folders on Windows.
• Checked on Windows only.

Not done

• Writing positions into video clips or HEIC photos.
• Adopting more than one folder at a time.
• Faster geocoding. The free geocoder allows a request a second; the lookups now spend fewer and show the time, but a different service could not be measured offline.

Under the hood

The bundled ffmpeg is the build distributed by the imageio-ffmpeg project and is licensed under the GPL; its licence and source are available from ffmpeg.org. If you already have ffmpeg installed, your own copy is used instead.