Do you also take a lot of screenshots and end up with a cluttered Desktop? I've experienced that frustration many times so I ended up writing a Python script to handle the tidying up for me 👩🏻‍💻

This script automatically detects all the screenshots and pictures on the Desktop and stores them in a ✨ dedicated folder ✨

Step 1: Import modules

Let's start by importing the necessary modules: os for handling operating system interactions and shutil for file-related tasks. We'll define the organize_screenshots function to contain our script's logic.

import os
import shutil

def organize_screenshots(desktop_path, screenshots_folder):

Step 2: Listing Desktop files

We begin by listing all files on the desktop using the listdir method, which returns a list of file names for a given path.

def organize_screenshots(desktop_path, screenshots_folder):
    desktop_files = os.listdir(desktop_path)

Step 3: Create Screenshots Folder

Next, we create the Screenshots folder. We use os.path.join to join path components and os.makedirs to create the directory. A check ensures that the Screenshots folder is only created once.

screenshots_path = os.path.join(desktop_path, screenshots_folder)
    if not os.path.exists(screenshots_path):
        os.makedirs(screenshots_path)

Step 4: Sorting the files

Now, comes the fun part! Let's loop through the desktop files. If a file is a screenshot or picture, we move it to the Screenshots folder using the shutil.move method with the original and destination file paths.

    for file_name in desktop_files:
        if file_name.lower().endswith(('.png', '.jpg', '.jpeg') or file_name.lower().startswith('Screen Shot')):
            file_path = os.path.join(desktop_path, file_name)
            dest_path = os.path.join(screenshots_path, file_name)

            shutil.move(file_path, dest_path)
            print(f"Moved {file_name} ✨")

Step 5: Bringing It All Together

Finally, let's bring everything together. We call our function with the correct paths and use the if __name__ == "__main__" construct to specify that this script is intended to be run as the main program.

import os
import shutil

def organize_screenshots(desktop_path, screenshots_folder):
    desktop_files = os.listdir(desktop_path)

    screenshots_path = os.path.join(desktop_path, screenshots_folder)
    if not os.path.exists(screenshots_path):
        os.makedirs(screenshots_path)

    for file_name in desktop_files:
        if file_name.lower().endswith(('.png', '.jpg', '.jpeg') or file_name.lower().startswith('Screen Shot')):
            file_path = os.path.join(desktop_path, file_name)
            dest_path = os.path.join(screenshots_path, file_name)

            shutil.move(file_path, dest_path)
            print(f"Moved {file_name} ✨")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    desktop_path = "../Desktop" 
    screenshots_folder = "Screenshots"

organize_screenshots(desktop_path, screenshots_folder)

To execute the script, open a CLI terminal and run the command (ensure that Python is installed on your operating system):

python3 <your_script_file_path>

Congratulations! Your cluttered Desktop is now organized! 👩🏻‍💻✨ You can find the full script in my Github repo.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! You can also find me on Github, LinkedIn, and Instagram.