There's a folder on my hard drive that I've been ignoring for years.
15,000 photos. Japan trips, LATT3 events, headshots that were professional, random phone shots from 2018, padel games, investor dinners, conference moments. All dumped in the same place with filenames like IMG_4827.jpg and no clear organization.
I'd thought about sorting them maybe a dozen times. Started once, gave up after 20 minutes. The job was too big to do manually and too irregular to hand off to a simple automation.
So last summer, I gave it to Claude Code.
Not to ask “how should I organize photos?” — to actually do the organizing.
How it worked
I opened Claude Code, pointed it at the photo folder, and wrote out some rules:
- Photos taken in Japan → create a Japan folder
- Photos where I appear in them and look professional → headshots folder
- Everything else → sort by year into date-range folders
Then I did something that still feels a little strange: I dropped in one photo of myself and told it, “That's me. If I appear in a photo and it looks like a professional or event setting, put it in the headshots folder.”
Just one reference photo. That was my “face registration.”
I closed my laptop and went about my day. Claude Code ran for a few hours in the background.
When I came back, it was done.
What actually happened under the hood
The reason this works so well for photos specifically is that photos carry two layers of information.
The first layer is metadata — the EXIF data embedded in every photo file. GPS coordinates, timestamps, camera model, even sometimes altitude. If a photo was taken in Kyoto, the metadata knows. If a batch was taken during the same three-day window, the timestamps can group them together.
The second layer is the actual image. When metadata alone isn't enough to make a decision, Claude Code looks at the photo and reasons about it. Is this a professional headshot? Is that Thanh in the foreground? Is this a restaurant, an outdoor event, a working session?
It's combining structured data with visual reasoning. That's the combination that makes it so powerful for this kind of job.
The bigger shift this represents
I tell people in workshops that most of us use AI like a search engine. We ask a question, get an answer, close the tab. Then we come back tomorrow and do the same thing.
That's a fine way to start. But it's maybe 5% of what's actually available.
Claude Code running locally on your computer is something different. It's an autonomous execution layer. You're not asking it questions — you're assigning it a task and giving it access to your files. It runs until the job is done.
A friend of mine had a similar experience when he was trying to get his Granola transcripts automatically uploaded to Google Drive. Granola didn't have any built-in automation. So he asked Claude Code to reverse-engineer the app file, figure out how it stored transcripts locally, and build the integration. It did exactly that. He described it as: “just point an AI at a problem and watch it solve things you'd have spent hours on manually.”
That's the mental model shift. From AI as conversation partner to AI as contractor.
You probably have your own version of 15,000 photos
Almost everyone I work with has some version of this problem.
A folder called “misc” that's been growing since 2021. A Downloads folder that's completely out of control. Invoices scattered across three different locations. Research screenshots that never got tagged or filed.
These tasks are too big to do manually in one sitting. They're irregular enough that a simple rule-based automation won't cover every case. But they're exactly the kind of thing Claude Code handles well — because it can read structured data AND make judgment calls on the edge cases.
The way I approach it:
- Define what “organized” actually looks like. Not vague — specific. “Japan photos go in a folder called Japan. Professional headshots where I'm in the main frame go in headshots.” The clearer your rules, the better the output.
- Give it one or two examples if there's visual judgment involved. For photos, I showed one reference photo of myself. For documents, you might paste in an example of what a “good” file name looks like. Examples do more work than instructions alone.
- Point it at the folder and let it run. Don't watch it work. Set it up, close the laptop, come back later. The runs that make me most impressed are the ones where I come back an hour later and realize the job is finished.
This isn't just a photo trick. Once you think of Claude Code as a contractor for local data tasks, you start seeing the same pattern everywhere.
What's sitting in your misc folder right now?
Thanh Pham is the founder of Asian Efficiency and runs the Two Hour Workday program. He teaches entrepreneurs and business owners how to use AI to cut busywork and free up time for what matters.
