The filing you keep meaning to do
Every library collects chores. Screenshots pile up between real photos. Drone footage never makes it into the album it belongs in. Scanned documents sit in the timeline where anyone glancing over your shoulder can see them. None of it is hard to fix — it's just endless, and you only ever do it in bursts.
A workflow is a standing instruction for that work. You describe the rule once, and from then on Gallery applies it to every photo the moment it arrives. No batch cleanups, no reminders, no drifting back into a mess three months later.
Trigger, filter, act
Every workflow reads top to bottom. It starts with a trigger — when a photo is uploaded, or once Gallery has finished reading its metadata. Then come filters that narrow things down, and finally the actions that actually do something.
Filters can match on the filename, the file's path on the server, the date a photo was taken, whether it's a photo or a video, where in the world it was shot, or whether it's missing a time zone. There's also an EXIF filter that reaches into the camera data itself — make, model, lens, ISO, aperture, focal length, rating and more — matched by contains, starts with, exact, or a full regular expression.
Once a photo passes the filters, the actions run in order: add it to an album, favorite it, archive it, move it into the locked folder, change its visibility, or fire a webhook at any URL you like so another system can take over.
Match where a file came from
Filenames only tell you so much. If your photos arrive from a connected library, a network share, or a scanner that drops files into a folder, the useful signal is where the file sits on the server, not what it happens to be called.
Switch a filename filter to match the full server path and a whole class of rules becomes possible: everything under a /scans/ folder goes straight to the locked folder, everything from the camera's SD-card import lands in this year's album, everything from a shared drop folder gets archived on arrival.
Build it visually, or edit the JSON
The builder is a plain list of cards you can reorder by dragging. Each step shows its own configuration inline, so a workflow you wrote months ago is still readable at a glance. Steps can be switched off individually while you test, and the whole workflow has its own on/off toggle.
If you'd rather work in text, flip to the JSON view — it stays in sync with the visual builder in both directions. That also makes workflows portable: copy one out, hand it to someone else running Gallery, and they can paste it straight in. A set of starter templates ships in the box for the common cases.
Why it's worth setting up once
The payoff isn't the minute you save on any single photo — it's that the library stops drifting. Rules you set today keep applying to photos you haven't taken yet, which is the difference between a library you tidy and a library that stays tidy.
