Sort your iPhone photos on Windows by place and trip — HEIC and all

The iPhone-photos-on-Windows problem

You moved thousands of photos off your iPhone onto a Windows PC and now you're stuck. Windows still struggles with HEIC (the format iPhones shoot by default) — thumbnails don't render, and some tools refuse to open the files at all. Worse, the thing that would make the photos easy to organize — the GPS location and date your iPhone quietly recorded — is buried in EXIF metadata you can't see in File Explorer.

So the Camera Roll sits in one giant folder, and sorting it by hand is a weekend you never get back.

Why converting HEIC first is the wrong move

The usual advice is "just batch-convert everything to JPG." Don't. Converting first is slow, doubles your disk usage, and — depending on the converter — can strip or mangle the EXIF GPS and timestamps that make location sorting possible. You'd be throwing away the exact data you need.

From Camera Roll dump to a clean location tree

Point DKPhotoSorter at your imported iPhone folder and it does two things every other date-only sorter skips:

• Reads the GPS in each photo's EXIF and turns coordinates into real place names using a bundled 400,000+ place database that works entirely offline (no lookups for the coordinates themselves).
• Looks at the photo itself with AI vision when there's no GPS — recognizing landmarks, signs, and venues (a stadium, a national park, a restaurant) so even AirDropped or screenshotted shots land in the right place.

The result is a folder tree you can actually navigate:

Sorted/
├── California/
│   └── Santa Monica/
│       └── Santa Monica Pier/
│           └── 2026-04-07/
├── Colorado/
│   └── Denver/
│       └── Red Rocks Amphitheatre/
│           └── 2026-06-14/
└── Home/
    └── 2026-05-02/

Trips and venues, detected automatically

Photos taken more than 80 km from your home address are automatically treated as a trip and get a State/City (US) or Country/City (international) prefix, so a two-week vacation separates itself from your everyday shots. Recognizable venues — theme parks, cruise ships, museums, concerts, restaurants — become their own subfolders, so travel folders are genuinely useful instead of a flat pile of dates.

Private by design — on your own AI key

DKPhotoSorter runs on your PC. There are no developer servers, no accounts, and no telemetry. Your original full-resolution photos never leave your computer — only a resized thumbnail plus limited metadata (filename, date, GPS, and the resolved place name) is sent to the AI provider you choose, on your own Google or OpenAI API key. You control the cost and the data. (See the Privacy Policy for the exact details.)

What it costs

A one-time $19.99 purchase — no subscription. AI analysis runs on your key at roughly $0.11 per 100 photos with Gemini Flash (about $1 per 1,000), and Gemini has a free tier for smaller batches. Already-analyzed photos are cached, so re-runs cost nothing.