Turn a messy trip dump into clean Country / City / Venue folders.

The post-vacation problem

You get home from two weeks abroad with thousands of photos in one folder — a jumble of HEIC from your iPhone, JPG from a partner's camera, a few screenshots of maps and tickets, and clips you shot along the way. There's no structure. The dates blur together, the file names are meaningless, and the one thing that could make sense of it all — where each photo was taken — is buried in EXIF metadata you can't see in File Explorer.

Sorting a trip like that by hand is a lost weekend. Most "photo organizers" only get you to date buckets, which doesn't help when the whole trip happened in the same two weeks. What you actually want is to walk the folder tree the way you walked the trip: country, city, the places you went.

Trip detection, done automatically

DKPhotoSorter reads the GPS coordinates in each photo and reverse-geocodes them entirely offline using a bundled 400,000+ place database. Any photo taken more than 80 km from your home address is treated as a trip and gets a location prefix:

• Domestic (US) trips get a State / City prefix — so a week in California separates cleanly from your everyday shots at home.
• International trips get a Country / City prefix — which is exactly how you sort photos by country automatically, with no manual tagging.

Everyday photos near home stay together, so your vacation never gets tangled up with your Tuesday-night dinners. You set your home address once and DKPhotoSorter forward-geocodes it via OpenStreetMap so the 80 km line is drawn from the right spot.

Venue recognition that makes travel folders useful

Country and city are a start, but a trip is really made of places. This is where DKPhotoSorter goes deeper than date-only or event-only sorting. For recognizable venues it creates a dedicated subfolder, so instead of one flat pile of dates you get the actual itinerary:

• Theme parks and their individual lands
• National and state parks, trailheads, and scenic overlooks
• Cruise ships and ports of call
• Museums, galleries, and historic sites
• Stadiums, arenas, and concert venues
• Notable restaurants, hotels, and landmarks

Venues come from two sources working together: the app verifies places near your GPS coordinates against OpenStreetMap Overpass, and when a photo has no GPS at all it uses AI vision to recognize the landmark, sign, or venue in the shot itself. That means an AirDropped picture or a screenshot with no coordinates still lands in the right place. With 790+ subject-normalization overrides and 17 parent categories, the naming stays consistent instead of drifting between spellings.

The result is a tree you can actually navigate:

Sorted/
├── Japan/
│   └── Kyoto/
│       └── Fushimi Inari Shrine/
│           └── 2026-04-11/
├── Japan/
│   └── Tokyo/
│       └── teamLab Planets/
│           └── 2026-04-14/
├── Italy/
│   └── Rome/
│       └── Colosseum/
│           └── 2026-04-18/
└── Home/
    └── 2026-05-02/

Multi-country trips, split by where you actually were

A single trip that crosses borders is where date sorting falls apart completely — three countries in ten days all land in the same date range. Because DKPhotoSorter places each photo by its own GPS location, one input folder spanning several countries is broken out into a separate Country / City branch for each place, in the order you were there. No pre-sorting, no per-country passes — drop the whole trip in and it sorts itself out. Non-photo files you shot along the way are routed aside into _Video, _Audio, _Documents and similar folders, so your image tree stays clean.

iPhone HEIC, read natively — no conversion

Most travel photos start on a phone, and iPhones shoot HEIC by default. The usual advice is to batch-convert everything to JPG first — but that's slow, doubles your disk usage, and can strip or mangle the exact EXIF GPS and timestamps that location sorting depends on. DKPhotoSorter skips that entirely: it reads HEIC and HEIF directly, alongside JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, BMP, JFIF, JP2 and more — 13 image formats in total — so your originals and their metadata stay untouched. (For an iPhone-specific walkthrough, see organizing iPhone photos on Windows by location, and for the general approach, organizing photos by location.)

Private — and on your own AI key

Travel photos are personal. DKPhotoSorter runs entirely on your PC with no developer servers, no accounts, and no telemetry. Your original full-resolution photos never leave your computer. Only a resized JPEG thumbnail plus limited metadata — filename, EXIF date, GPS coordinates, the resolved place name, and (if you set them) your home address, keywords, or a Tag City — is sent to the AI provider you choose, on your own Google Gemini or OpenAI API key. GPS coordinates also go to OpenStreetMap Overpass for venue lookup. You pick the provider, you hold the key, you control the cost. (See the Privacy Policy for the exact details.)

What it costs

DKPhotoSorter is a one-time $19.99 purchase — no subscription. AI analysis runs on your own key, and costs are estimated and will vary, but for a rough guide: Gemini Flash lands around $0.11 per 100 photos (about $1.10 per 1,000), Gemini Flash-Lite around $0.04 per 100, and OpenAI GPT-4.1-mini around $0.32 per 100. Gemini also has a free tier — roughly 25 requests a day on Flash (about 17 photos) or around 200 a day on Flash-Lite — which is plenty to sort a trip a little at a time. Analyzed photos are cached, so re-running a folder costs $0, and you can set a hard cost limit so a big batch never surprises you.