Cleaning up 194 GB of photos
A user had an LLM help consolidate and de-duplicate a large photo archive, shrinking it to about a third of its size.
- Agent or tool
- Claude Code
- Topic
- Personal Files
- Reported on
- Blog
- Added
- 2026-10-15
Why it matters
Everyone has a messy folder somewhere. Agents that can sort, rename and summarise files make digital clutter far less painful to deal with. It is one of 3 sightings filed under Personal Files on Agent Sightings (number 3 by interest), and one of 164 involving Claude Code.
How you could try it
Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into Claude Code or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.
Working on a copy, find duplicate photos by hash, rename files as YYYY-MM-DD_HHMMSS using EXIF data, and sort them into year folders. Report counts before and after.
Tip: Point the agent at a copy of the folder first, so nothing important is lost if it sorts things the wrong way.
Source
Read the original first-hand account on Blog: https://clement.n8r.ch/en/articles/photo-migration-llm/. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.