This is a short tutorial that suggests a way to organize a very large amount of files with DropIt, for example if you need to recover files from a old hard disk or a messy directory.

The simple idea is to proceed into two steps, doing a first pre-sorting operation to make a macro division by format and then manage each group of files separately.

This step is the core of the idea: before using all the associations needed to organize your files, start creating a single association that performs a first separation of your files.

If you are new with DropIt, you could need to read How to start with DropIt before proceed.

This is the suggested single association, that separates your files by format into different folders:

Name: Separate files by format
Rules: *
Action: Move
Destination: C:\Example\Of\Destination\%FileExt%

Now drag&drop your files onto DropIt to proceed and separate them.

Now your files are separated into folders named like jpg, txt, doc…

You can disable the association used for the first step and use all the desired actions on your files, with the advantage of process them one format per time (so you can for example ignore undesired formats or manually verify what files do you have for a specific format).

You can find some examples to organize files in these tutorials:
How to organize images by date and properties
How to organize music by tag and properties
How to move files recreating the folder structure