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After over a decade of mainstream digital photography, most people have likely accumulated a hard drive full of mysterious files called things like IMG 2346 and wedding37. In amongst them are undoubtedly a few perfect, high quality snapshots, but very few users ever have time to sort the wheat from the chaff — the one family photo where everyone is smiling from the fifteen almost identical selfies. Offering to put an end to this mess, ZZ Photo is an automatic image sorting software from the Ukraine which collates the user’s entire collection of digital images — including those from photosharing sites — and sorts them into manageable, user friendly collections.

To begin, Windows users download ZZ Photo to their desktop and the software automatically gathers every picture from their hard drive as well as from sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Flickr. The program then uses inbuilt algorithms to identify, label and categorize different photo types such as mountain landscapes as opposed to ocean scenes — and reappearing faces. The user is asked to tag friends and family initially, after which the program does this automatically using facial recognition software — it can even recognize different pets. It can also detect and automatically delete duplicate photos.

ZZ Photo then organizes the pictures into searchable maps, timelines and collections, which enables the viewer to easily find the event, person, place or day they are looking for. The program costs USD 29.95 but is currently only available for Windows 7 users. Could other types of digital files be organized in similar user-friendly ways?