Sort images by color with ImageSorter

Photo managers offer many ways to organize and sort your images -- name, date, size, tags -- but these typically rely on your pictures being set up in a consistent way.

ImageSorter for Windows and Mac doesn’t care about any of that, because it only uses the image content, sorting and presenting it by color and layout.

Getting started is easy. Just point the program at a folder containing images, and it scans them, creates thumbnails and sorts them into order.

ImageSorter is trying to give an overview of your photos, so if you’ve thousands of images then the individual thumbnails will be tiny. But you’ll still have enough to see the primary colors, helping you pick out shots which are mostly blue skies, green countryside, sunsets, faces and more.

The process worked well for us, with related shots grouped together, often surprisingly accurately.

Multiple shots of the same view, similar portrait shots of the same person, any pictures with a distinctive palette were generally displayed right next to each other, regardless of their resolution, file name, date or other details.

ImageSorter could also help out if you’re just looking for pictures with a similar palette, maybe to match a website design.

And of course it helps you find duplicates, too.

What you don’t get, unfortunately, are many options for processing the images you’ve found.

There are the basic essentials: double-click to open an image in your default viewer, right-click to copy it to the clipboard.

Select multiple images, right-click, and you’ll also find options to move, copy or delete them.

But you can’t access Explorer’s regular right-click menu for images. Or choose a preferred program for opening them. Or drag and drop selected pictures somewhere else. Or view images as a list, with their details, to help choose and delete duplicates. Or… You get the idea.

And there’s more, because ImageSorter is a beta, which hasn’t been updated since 2011, and is no longer supported.

That’s a pity, but these don’t have to be fatal issues. ImageSorter’s "sort by similarity" feature still works very well, and -- as long as you don’t expect the supporting features to be anything like as good -- we think it justifies the download all on its own.