Six hundred photos. Never labelled, never sorted, never even named. Just sitting in a content dump folder where the only way to find anything was to scroll and hope. Normally someone has to sit down and label all of that by hand. I got Claude to do it instead, and now I can ask for a shot of me speaking at a conference and have it in about two seconds.
Everything is in proper folders with proper file names, so I can browse it like a normal human being or just get Claude to go and find the content for me. The best part is there is no coding at all. It is all done inside the Claude desktop app.
What you need
Genuinely just two things.
Claude on a paid plan, which starts at around NZ$40 a month, and you want the desktop app rather than the website - that is where Claude Cowork lives, and Cowork is the part that can actually touch your files.
Your photos sitting on your computer. It does not matter whether you use iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox. They have all got a desktop app that syncs your stuff down locally. The only thing that matters is that when you open that folder on your computer, you can actually see the photos inside it. For Google Drive, download the desktop app, click sync, and you are away.
Then in Claude, go to the Cowork tab and open the folder with your photos in it. That is the setup done.
Decide the structure before Claude touches anything
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that matters most. Before you let Claude near your files, you need to tell it what you want the structure to be.
So I sat down and wrote mine out. Travel, with Japan, China and New Zealand underneath it. Events, broken down into speaking versus work. Products. Sport. And a review folder, which is where screenshots and other random bits go so it is not sitting there trying to guess what to do with them.
If you do not give it an actual structure, it will invent one. What you get back is 40 folders that mean nothing to you. You need to decide what format suits how you actually work, and then split your photos and videos that way.
The trick: catalogue first, move second
Here is the bit that makes this safe. You do not tell it to go and organise everything from scratch. You tell it to go through every single photo and write down what it sees into a catalogue.
Nothing moves. Nothing gets renamed. It just records, for each photo, what is actually in it, which folder it should go in, and what it should be called.
Why this way around? Cowork is working on your real files, and there is no real undo button. If you tell it to organise everything in one go and it gets a chunk of it wrong, you are now going through hundreds of files putting them back together by hand. If you write the catalogue first, you can read it, verify it, and check the categories and labels are right. And if it is wrong, you are making changes to a text file rather than to your actual folders. Far easier to check, and it keeps a human in the loop.
While we are here: back up your photos before you start anything like this. It will save you badly on any big tidy up.
Then let it run
Once I am happy with the catalogue, I just tell it to go ahead. You can watch it work through and rename everything out of the original folder into the new ones, moving every photo where it is supposed to go. Six hundred photos, and I am sat there watching it happen.
Because it is all done on my computer, once the folders sync back up to Google Drive or OneDrive it is immediately available on every device I use.
What you end up with
Two things, and both are useful.
First, the folders and file names. That is the human layer. Japan Tokyo Skyline Silhouette. China Delegation Hospital Visit. I can find anything in there by eye now, which I genuinely could not do before.
Second, the catalogue. That is the bit Claude searches. When I ask for footage, it reads the list, works out which photos and folders I should be looking at, and hands them back. It is not going to look at 600 images every single time I ask for something - it is reading a page of text, which makes it very fast.
The reason to do it this way rather than using some app to hold it all is simple. I have watched too many people build a tiny system that only they can use, and then abandon it. This sits inside the Google Drive or OneDrive you are already using, and it is just folders.
What I actually use it for
I was putting together a video from my China trip and needed all the group shots of our team. I asked Claude for them and it collected them into a new folder I could send straight to my editor. It reads the list, works out which ones match, and copies them across. No scrolling, no hunting.
The one I use most is presentations. If I need a photo of me next to a humanoid robot, or something from a client shoot, I ask and it pulls it together for the deck. That is the whole point - I am describing what I want, rather than trying to remember what I called it and which folder I put it in.
It is not perfect, and that is fine
It is looking at a photo and making its best guess, and sometimes those guesses are wrong. You will get a handful in there that are completely off. That is exactly why you skim the list before letting it move anything.
Across 600 photos that skim takes maybe half an hour, and the majority of it will be correct. Half an hour of checking against a job that would otherwise never get done at all.
This works on more than photos
Decide the folders, sort out the structure, get it to write the catalogue, review it, then let it move. You can point that at anything.
The same process works on folders of PDFs, contracts, receipts - anything where you have got a big pile of stuff and no way to search it. Look at it, describe it, write it down, make it searchable.
And outside of file organisation, most manual repetitive tasks in a business can be automated the same way. If you have got a pile of tedious jobs sitting across yours, get in touch and we can have a look at them.
