Tidy

Tidy is a Mac app that organizes files by reading what's inside them. The problem it goes after is the slow-motion mess every Mac accumulates. Screenshots land on the desktop named by timestamp, so a capture of a receipt from March looks identical to a capture of a boarding pass from June. Installers linger in Downloads long after they've done their job. Scanned PDFs are the worst offenders, since a scan is really a photograph of a page wrapped in a PDF container, which means Spotlight can't index a single word of it. Tidy runs on-device text recognition over these files, works out what each one actually contains, and renames and sorts them so the filename finally matches the content.

It does this through a handful of focused tools rather than one sprawling rules engine. Auto-Drop watches for new screenshots, reads them with OCR, and archives them under names that describe what was on screen. Smart Eject notices mounted .dmg files and cleans them up once the installer has served its purpose. Flow Rules sort files by type or filename, with optional content-based renaming, so a folder of cryptically named scans can turn into something you can navigate at a glance. On top of all that sits a global search, triggered with Option Space from anywhere on the system, that digs through the contents of your files rather than just their names.

That search fills a genuinely annoying macOS gap. Because a scanned PDF has no text layer, Spotlight simply skips it, and the usual fix is OCR software that writes an invisible text layer back into each document, which means modifying your files. Tidy takes a different path. It reads each file once, in its original location and without importing anything into a proprietary library, then stores the recognized text in its own index. That index is encrypted on your device and secured through the macOS Keychain, and searches run against it instead of the files themselves. Your PDFs stay untouched while a keystroke search suddenly covers years of scanned paperwork.

The site walks through the alternatives honestly, which is a good sign in a utility. You can check whether a PDF has a text layer at all by dragging a cursor across the words in Preview, and if nothing highlights, you're holding a scan. From there, one option is OCR software that writes recognized text back into each file as an invisible layer, which makes the document searchable everywhere but means editing it. Another is the free Extract Text action in the macOS Shortcuts app, which runs on device with no upload. Tidy's separate-index approach is the third route, and it's the one that scales to a whole folder tree of old scans without touching any of them. Once the index exists, finding the scan that mentions a specific invoice number takes a keystroke instead of twenty minutes of opening files one at a time.

Safety is a design pillar rather than a footnote. Tidy never deletes anything, files only ever move to the Trash. A dry-run mode shows every planned action before anything executes, an undo control reverses an entire sorting pass in one click, and the app only touches files created after it was installed, so it won't rampage through your existing archive on day one. An activity log that survives restarts records what it did and when. There are some thoughtful extras in the same spirit. A privacy audit warns you when sensitive documents, things like card numbers, IDs, and contracts, are sitting exposed in your folders. Another check flags executables disguised as documents. A Stage mode hides your desktop before you share your screen.

It fits anyone whose Mac has quietly become a landfill of screenshots, receipts, invoices, and scans, and who wants order without babysitting an automation tool. The obvious comparison is Hazel, and Tidy publishes its own comparison page, but the pitch here leans harder on content understanding. Instead of asking you to write rules around filenames and extensions, Tidy reads the files and names them after what they say. The privacy posture is strict throughout. All processing happens on your machine, there's no account to create, no server on the other end, and no telemetry phoning home. The app is localized in English, Spanish, German, French, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Pricing is refreshingly simple. Tidy costs nine dollars as a one-time purchase with lifetime updates included, so there's no subscription anywhere in sight, and a 14-day guarantee means you can get a refund if it doesn't stick. It requires macOS 14 or later, runs natively on both Apple silicon and Intel, and ships signed and notarized by Apple. For the price of a sandwich you get a file system that finally names itself, and a search box that can see inside the scans Spotlight gave up on.