How do I sort files by type and date on Android?

Last reviewed: September 23, 2026 · Markdown version

Sorting by type is a filing decision; sorting by date is a viewing decision — and confusing them is why file managers feel so unsatisfying. Type says where a file should live on disk. Date says what you want at the top of the list right now. Both are useful; they are simply not the same operation, and only one of them moves anything.

Date: a view, not a move

Ordering by date is a display setting. Google's help for Files by Google describes it: on the top right, tap More, then Sort by, and "Select an option to sort your files by File name, Date, or Size" (View your files, read 23 September 2026). That ordering is temporary and that is the point: you want the newest download for ten seconds, not a folder structure built around November 2024.

What is worth thinking twice about is filing into dated folders — a 2026-09 folder, then 2026-10, forever. On a phone that scatters related files across a dozen month-folders and breaks the "all my PDFs" question you actually ask. Ordering a list by date costs nothing and is reversible; building a folder tree out of dates is a structure you have to live with.

Type: the one worth automating

Type is stable. A PDF is a PDF whenever it arrived, so a folder built on type stays meaningful for years, and it answers the question people actually ask a phone: where are my documents, where is that video. It also makes storage legible — a single Videos folder shows you the files themselves, where Settings gives you a list of categories to tap through ("Tap Storage. Select a category." — Free up storage on your Android device, read 23 September 2026).

Where Adinand Auto File Sorter fits — and the limit, stated plainly

It files by type: it watches a folder — Downloads by default — and moves what lands there into Downloads › Sorted Files, in sub-folders named for the category: Documents, Images, Videos, Apps, Audio, Archives, Others. Filing by month is the part it leaves alone: there is no rule that puts a file into a folder for the month it arrived. The one date test it has is a Pro rule's "older than" age, which gathers files older than a number of days into one folder you name.

Three more limits worth knowing before you rely on it:

Categorisation is by file extension only. A .pdf is a Document because of its extension, not because anything read it. A file with no extension at all is never sorted.
The scan is not recursive. Only files sitting directly in a watched folder are moved — never the contents of folders inside it.
It never overwrites, and sorting never deletes. A name collision becomes name (1).ext; if a same-named file is byte-for-byte identical it is treated as already moved.

If what you want is a keyword rather than a type — everything with "invoice" in the name into its own folder — that is what its custom rules do, on Pro: an extension list, a "name contains" keyword, or both, and optionally an "older than" age in days, counted from the file's last-modified date, or a "larger than" size in MB. A rule with only an age or a size catches files of every type, so stale downloads can be gathered into one folder; it still will not build a folder for each month.