Justin Noel: [00:00:00] So your file system is a mess, as we all know. Garbage in, garbage out. Rolling your own organization for your file system is really hard. For example, this health folder and this medical folder. Aren’t they kind of duplicates? If you start searching for stuff in one, will you miss the stuff in the other?

Then there are some predefined systems like Johnny Decimal. It’s got this technique where you organize your entire digital life in 10 different folders with no more than 10 different sub-folders. So what are some examples of your cluttered life? Where was your travel itinerary? Was it in your email? And my email search is terrible.

Look. For example here, I’m searching for a travel confirmation and I’m getting some newsletters. Where was that receipt? [00:01:00] Did you put it in the file system? Which folder? Search pulls up too many unassociated files. Again, I’m looking for a travel confirmation and somehow I’m getting some SQL files and some JavaScript files.

It’s just too complicated. Where was that suggestion for a presentation tool? Was it in Slack? Which Slack group I’m a member of many, and unfortunately, free plans erase all the messages after 30 days. So you go searching for something and you get this message instead. So screenshots to the rescue, I literally screenshot everything that I may ever want to find again.

Pictures, payment confirmations, receipts, um, important conversations in slack and discord. If somebody says really nice things about you, you might want to save it to cheer you up later. Seriously, screenshot everything. So how do screenshots help you find stuff in Mac os? All of your screenshots and photos [00:02:00] automatically have optical character recognition or OCR performed on them.

So if there’s some text in your screenshots, then you can search for those quite easily. Now that you’re capturing screenshots of all your important information, how do you find it again? Well, if you go into Finder and click in the search field, you can just search for text that you’re looking for. For example, I might also search for say, winder,

and you’ll see another screenshot that has the word windsurf in it. So thanks to RCR you can find anything you’re looking for in your screenshots. I find it much quicker and easier to use Raycast than I do finder with Raycast. I can just trigger Raycast and start typing search and screenshots, and then I can do something like windsurf.

And as you can see, just like in finder command Y lets me open up the following quick. Look. This presentation said A, I was gonna make my life [00:03:00] easier. So our screenshot file names are pretty useless. You basically have to search to find anything within them. But what if you just wanted to scan the files to find the file you’re looking for?

That’s where this great app called Keep It Shot, comes in, keep it shot, can monitor your, um, screenshots folder, and automatically begin renaming the files using ai. Now, normally you do this automatically, but I’m just gonna do it, uh, manually. I’ll do, I’m gonna do command shift y. You can see it’s added all those files into a queue and it’s renaming them, and as you can see, the files are getting renamed with much more relevant information.

Now, all my files have been renamed to something very descriptive. You can see that just by looking at the file names, I get an idea of what’s in them. So why rename files? I told you earlier that you can search for everything you want in your files, but that’s only if there’s text in them. What if a [00:04:00] file you you want to find doesn’t have text in it, like maybe it’s a dog or something?

So in this example, I searched for aircraft because I remember that I mentioned an aircraft carrier. There’s no text in this file, so I wouldn’t normally find the word aircraft inside here, but because I renamed my fouls, I can find aircraft in the file name. There’s some other benefits as well, like when you’re sharing files in Slack.

Notice here in my message, I don’t say the word aircraft anywhere. If somebody else were looking for, um, this conversation I had, they might look for the word aircraft and they wouldn’t find anything. But fortunately, my file name included the word aircraft and Slack uses that in search. However, keep it shot does have some limitations.

For one, you can only have one watch folder. So if you want to have screenshots or other [00:05:00] images in different files, keep it shot. Can’t help you with that. It also only gives you one chance for a rename prompt where you’re telling the AI how to rename the file. So I used vibe coating in both Cursor and Windsurf, and I spent an awful lot of time telling.

The AI agent that they’ve undo something I’ve already wanted done. Um, they broke something that was already working, and of course then I reached my trial limit and I had to subscribe. But in the end, I did get a working program, and it’s called AI File renamer. Now let’s see how this custom AI file renaming application works.

As you can see, I’ve got some screenshots queued up that need to be renamed. Here I’ll be tailing the output file of the program and now I’m gonna launch it as an OS Mac OS launch agent. We’ll kick it off here and load, and you see this program has started, okay, as you can see it as [00:06:00] finished renaming.

All of those screenshots. You can see there’s descriptive text for all of them. So if I need to search by text that’s inside the files, I can do that and I can also search on file name, so that program is working well. Wait, there’s more. The A file rename app also lets you create different configurations for different file folders, so I can have one for screenshots and most importantly for me, I can also have one for any scanned documents I have.

And now you can see that the a i file rename app has organized all of my scans so I can easily review them and figure out what I’m looking for. So here’s all the tools I use to organize my daily life. Most of them. Clean Shot and pixel Snap are great. Um, screenshotting tools made by the same company.

Raycast makes it very easy for me to do my searches. Who Topo is like the ultimate Mac search app, set app. I get most of these apps for, uh, set monthly [00:07:00] rate. And of course here is the AI file, renamer.