Fast Media Sorter for Windows
Fast Media Sorter for Windows (formerly FastMediaSorter LITE - it is still published under that name in the Microsoft Store and winget) is a Windows Forms application for quickly sorting, viewing, and managing image and video files - because that folder full of 4000 photos is not going to triage itself. It supports a wide range of media formats and provides features such as:
- Fast navigation through large folders of images and videos (even the embarrassingly large ones)
- Slideshow and random file viewing modes
- Recent files and folders tracking, so you don't have to remember where you left off
- Pick up where you stopped: switch on "Resume the last file" and a plain start reopens the exact file that was on screen last time, with its folder listed behind it - and a video carries on from the position it was left at. Off unless you ask for it; a file that has since gone simply leaves the window empty (64-bit program)
- File operations: move, copy, rename, and delete
- Deleting is no longer the one thing you cannot take back:
DEL sends the file to the Recycle Bin where one exists, Shift+DEL goes past it on purpose, and every permanent deletion names its reason - a network drive and a memory stick have no bin at all, and the app says so instead of pretending. U walks back through the last 50 operations, renames and deletions included, each file returning to its folder and to its place in the list (64-bit program)
- Move or copy, decided as you go: a digit
1..9/0 moves the current file into that folder, Shift + the same top-row digit copies it there - no mode to switch on beforehand and forget about. The same pair is on the recipients panel, in both media menus, and in the recipients table (Shift + double-click). Whether a copy then jumps to the next file is one checkbox in Settings, on by default (64-bit program)
- Recipients panel over the media: a floating list of your hotkey destination folders - click a row to move the current file there, the narrow zone beside it to copy it (or delete it), so you can sort one-handed with the mouse (off by default; toggle in Settings)
- Image panel for quick visual navigation
- A ZIP or CBZ opens like a folder - a comic or a folder of scans browses, slideshows, zooms and translates exactly like loose files, with nothing unpacked in advance and nothing left behind afterwards (64-bit program)
- Mark up and crop a picture in its own window - brush, rectangle and ellipse, colour and thickness, a live crop frame with handles,
Ctrl+Z, then save over the original or beside it in any of six formats. Your EXIF comes with it (64-bit program)
- Turn an animation into a real video - an animated WEBP, APNG or GIF becomes an ordinary MP4 next to it, with a seek bar, a pause, hardware decoding and full colour, and replaces the original. The encoder (FFmpeg, GPL, ~110 MB) is not bundled: the first conversion asks whether to download it. Because the original is deleted permanently, the app says so first, names both files, and warns when transparency is about to be flattened onto black (64-bit program)
- A slow format opens once, not once per view - animated WEBP, AVIF and HEIC have no Windows codec, so the app decodes them itself; that work is now kept on disk and reused while the file is unchanged, so the "Loading.." badge appears once per file instead of every time you come back to it. Visible, clearable and capped in Settings;
0 switches it off (64-bit program)
- Automatic EXIF orientation correction, for when the camera was held sideways
- High-quality (bicubic) scaling for sharp downscaling of large images
- Optional on-image overlay with the file name and position (handy in full-screen)
- Configurable slideshow interval
- Register the app as the default image viewer and/or video player (per-user, no admin rituals)
- Folder sharing over SFTP ("Android Folder Share"): turn this PC into an SFTP server for the folders you pick, and open them from the Android app - or from any other SFTP client - over your home LAN or across the internet, paired by scanning a QR code. Ships switched off; see Your folders over SFTP. 64-bit program only
- OCR + on-image translation overlay (local Ollama / LibreTranslate) - for pictures that insist on speaking another language
- Perspective ("Ambilight-style") background: the bars beside a photo are filled with colour drawn from its own edges, so it sits in its own light instead of on black. Optionally as a halo that fades out into the background (64-bit program)
- Zoom at the mouse cursor on the grey NumPad keys, with drag-to-pan (64-bit program)
- A video control bar - seek, time, mute, volume - plus audio-track and subtitle picking remembered by language, and "Open URL.." to play a video straight off
smb://, sftp://, http(s):// and friends (64-bit program)
- A music file gets a screen, not a black rectangle - MP3, WAV, M4A, WMA and OGG show their embedded album cover, or a wave-and-particle animation when there is none, with the title, artist, album, codec, bitrate and length along the bottom. Its own Settings section decides what happens when the track ends, whether the transport panel stays up, and a sleep timer of up to three hours. Video and audio can each be left out of paging entirely, so a folder of photographs stays a folder of photographs (64-bit program)
- Menus right on the media: middle-click a picture, right-click a video (64-bit program)
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts, because reaching for the mouse is so last decade
- Interface in 13 languages - English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Chinese. The first run follows your Windows display language; the toolbar button switches it any time, and the Share Manager follows the same choice. Arabic and Urdu are laid out right to left. Only English, Russian and Ukrainian are proofread by the author - the other ten are machine translations and are not proofread, so corrections through the issue tracker are very welcome. The 32-bit fallback build keeps English and Russian only (Windows 7 has no font for the Indic scripts), and the setup wizard stays English.
- Broad video format support: everything (H.264/MP4, AVI, ZMBV, VP9, MKV, WMV, ..)
plays in-window through the bundled LibVLC engine - no external codecs, no
plugin scavenger hunt, and nothing that depends on Internet Explorer still being
installed
Mobile Version 📱
Want to sort media from the comfort of the couch? Check out FastMediaSorter v2 - a powerful Android application with support for local files, network drives (SMB, SFTP, FTP), and cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox):
🔗 FastMediaSorter for Android website · GitHub
Get it on Google Play, IzzyOnDroid, or as a direct APK from GitHub Releases.
Features include:
- Unified interface for all file sources (local, network, cloud)
- Built-in media player and EPUB e-book reader
- Image editing (rotate, flip, filters, adjustments)
- Auto-translation with OCR support
- Favorites system and PIN protection
- Advanced gestures and keyboard navigation
Desktop as copilot: Fast Media Sorter for Windows can act as the mobile app's server - its built-in SFTP service publishes the folders you pick, so the Android app browses this PC directly, on your home network or over the internet. That is the next section.
Your folders over SFTP
Sorting media does not have to mean copying it somewhere first. Android Folder Share turns this PC
into a small SFTP server for the folders you choose, so a sorter running somewhere else works on the
files where they already live - nothing is uploaded, no cloud account is involved, and the folders stay
exactly where they are. It is a plain, standard SFTP service, so those folders open in:
- FastMediaSorter for Android - the case it was built for: the phone sorts the photos and videos
sitting on this PC's disks, over your home Wi-Fi or across the internet, after a one-time pairing by
QR code (or an exported
.fmscfg file).
- Any other SFTP client - WinSCP, FileZilla, a file manager on Linux or macOS, another PC. The
address and port, the login, the password and the host-key fingerprint are all shown in the Share
Manager window, each with a copy button.
What it does, and what it deliberately does not:
- Only the folders you add are visible, each under a name you give it, and any of them can be
published read-only.
- It ships switched off. The whole sharing surface stays dormant until you enable server
features - a checkbox during installation, or a one-time button in Share Manager that adds the one
Windows Firewall rule the service needs. Until then nothing listens and the app is a pure
viewer/sorter.
- The connection is encrypted and direct (SSH/SFTP), device to PC. The client pins this PC's host
key at the first pairing, so a substituted server is noticed rather than trusted.
- Sharing is managed by a separate program - the bundled tray companion Fast Media Sorter: Share
Manager, opened from the viewer's folder right-click or from Settings → Files and system.
Being a 64-bit program itself, it is why folder sharing is 64-bit only.
Step by step: how to use the SFTP service,
and the detailed guide to publishing your folders for Android
when the connection has to cross a router.
Always-on variant (optional): by default the folders are reachable only while you are signed in and the Share Manager is running - right for a normal PC. If the machine's job is to stay available (a dedicated server, a VPS, an always-on home server), the same worker can be hosted by a Windows service instead: it starts at boot, serves with nobody logged on, and restarts itself if it fails. There are two ways in. An ordinary installation can switch itself over in the Share Manager (Manage hosting.. -> Switch sharing to a Windows service.., one administrator prompt that also moves the state and grants the service access to the folders you share), or you can install the separate Folder Share Server edition (winget install --id SerZhyAle.FastMediaSorter.Server), which sets the same service up straight away - for a machine provisioned without ever opening the app. Either way it takes administrator approval once and is never enabled silently: no regular setup, winget install or Store install registers the service on its own, and the Store build cannot register one at all. SFTP, the QR/.fmscfg pairing and the Android app are identical - only the host differs, and switching editions preserves the host key so paired phones need no re-pairing.
Usage
- Select a folder containing your media files (yes, that one).
- Navigate files using keyboard, mouse, or on-screen buttons - whatever your hands prefer.
- Use the panel and recent files features for quick access.
- Move, copy, or delete files as needed. Press a digit, watch the chaos shrink.
- Enjoy fast and efficient media sorting, and maybe finally reclaim that disk space.
HOW TO guides
Short, practical walkthroughs on the site - one per task (English and Russian):
| Guide | What it covers |
|---|
| Viewer | Review and sort a media folder without losing your flow |
| Keys | The whole key map, zoom, full screen and the slideshow |
| Setup | Default viewer, interface language, and what happens to a file |
| OCR | Recognize text on a picture and read it in your language |
| Editor | Draw on a photo, crop it, and write the result back |
| Archives | Page through a ZIP or CBZ as if it were a folder |
| SFTP | Publish selected PC folders to your Android device |
| Android network | Router, port forwarding and the internet path, step by step |
Two programs, one app
The package ships two viewers side by side in the same folder, and the installer
sets up both. You never have to choose: the shortcut and file associations
automatically point at the one that actually runs on your machine.
FastMediaSorter_LITE.exe - the main program, now 64-bit and built on
.NET 10. It replaces the previous version in place and keeps all your settings.
Nothing to install - the .NET runtime lives inside the program itself, so the
old ".NET Framework 4.8 required" line is gone for good. Needs Windows 10 version
1607 or newer, Windows 11, or Windows Server 2016+.FastMediaSorter_x86.exe - the sorter as a small 32-bit program (~3 MB)
for Windows 7/8.1 and 32-bit Windows, where the modern runtime simply cannot run.
It needs .NET Framework 4.8, which those Windows versions either already have or
can get. Sorting, browsing, OCR and translation are all still in there; what it
does not have is Android folder sharing (see the table below) and the extras the
modern runtime made possible - zoom on the grey keys, the video control bar,
audio/subtitle track picking, "Open URL..", the picture and video menus and the
perspective halo.
They are one application, not two rivals: one set of settings, one window. Start
one while the other is open and it just brings the open window forward with your
file - no second window, no squabbling over whose settings get saved. Both also
share the same adjacent libraries (codecs, OCR/translation models), each
automatically picking the ones matching its own bitness.
What the 64-bit program adds
- Animated WEBP now opens everywhere. The app decodes WEBP itself instead of
depending on the Windows "WebP Image Extensions" codec, which server editions of
Windows don't ship - animated WEBP used to simply fail there.
- HEIC, HEIF and AVIF open too - the formats iPhones save by default and the web
increasingly serves. Decoded by the app itself, so no Store extensions and no paid
"HEVC Video Extensions" codec are needed; sideways phone shots come up the right
way round.
- Video always plays through the built-in VLC engine. The retired Internet
Explorer component is no longer used, so playback works the same on systems where
IE has been shown the door. (The 32-bit program keeps the classic path.)
- A video control bar: play/pause, seek, running time, mute and volume, along the
bottom of the picture. It appears on mouse-over and slips away a couple of seconds
later, and stays put while the video is paused. (The 32-bit program's video runs
through the IE component, which draws its own controls.)
- Zoom on the grey keys: grey
+/- zoom at the mouse cursor, grey / fits,
grey * is actual size. Drag to pan. The wheel still flips through files unless
you switch it to zoom in Settings.
- Audio track and subtitle picking:
A cycles audio, V subtitles, and a
"Tracks" button appears only when the file offers a choice. Your pick is remembered
by language, so the next episode comes up the same way.
- "Open URL.." - play a video straight off
smb://, sftp://, ftp://,
http(s)://, nfs:// or rtsp:// without downloading it first.
- Menus on the media: middle-click a picture for everything you can do to it,
right-click a video for everything you can do to that. Click a video to
pause/resume.
- A halo instead of bars - "Dynamic perspective", a sub-option of the perspective
background, fades the bars into the background the further they get from the photo.
Its own sub-option grows that halo out of the photo's edge on each new picture, at
one of three speeds (slow, medium - the default - or fast).
- The Recycle Bin, and an undo that means it.
DEL puts the file in the bin,
Shift+DEL deletes past it, and where Windows keeps no bin - a network share, a
memory stick, a drive with the bin switched off - the question says which of those
it is rather than a flat "are you sure". U steps back through the last 50
operations: moves, copies, F6 renames and deletions, the last of these taken
back out of the bin, into the folder and onto the screen. The question before a
deletion is its own three-value setting - always, only when the file will not go
to the bin, or never. (The 32-bit program deletes finally, as it always did.)
- Archives browse like folders: a
.zip or .cbz opens as an ordinary file
list, one picture extracted at a time into a private folder that is swept away
when you leave - or on the next archive, if the app was killed. The archive is
only ever read, so DEL and the destination folders say so instead of acting.
(7z, RAR and CBR are not open yet.)
- An editing window that writes to disk. Brush, rectangle and ellipse, outlined
or filled, eight colour swatches beside the full picker, thickness in the
picture's own pixels,
Shift for a square or circle, Ctrl+Z. Cropping is a live
frame with eight handles - everything outside it dims, and nothing is cut until
Enter. Save writes over the original through a temporary file, so a share
that blinks cannot leave half a photo; Save as.. offers PNG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF
and WebP. EXIF is carried across and the stale embedded thumbnail dropped. Adding
text is the one part not there yet.
Requirements
Short version: the installer works this out for you (see above). Long version:
| FastMediaSorter_LITE.exe (main, 64-bit) | FastMediaSorter_x86.exe (32-bit) |
|---|
| Windows | 10 version 1607+, 11, Server 2016+ | 7, 8.1, 10, 11 - including 32-bit |
| Runtime | none - it is inside the program | .NET Framework 4.8 |
| Sorting, browsing, slideshow | yes | yes |
| OCR + on-image translation | yes | yes |
| Recipients panel | yes | yes |
| Video | LibVLC, with a control bar | IE component (H.264) + LibVLC fallback |
| HEIC / HEIF / AVIF | yes | no - Windows 7/8.1 have no codecs for them |
| Recycle Bin + 50-step undo | yes | no - DEL is final and undo is one operation deep |
| ZIP / CBZ as a folder | yes | no - "Unsupported format", as before |
| Image editing (draw, crop, save) | yes | no |
| Zoom keys, track picking, "Open URL..", media menus, perspective halo | yes | no |
| Android folder sharing | yes | no - the Share Manager is itself a 64-bit program, so it cannot start on the Windows versions this build is for |
Installation
winget
winget install --id SerZhyAle.FastMediaSorter
The winget package uses the Inno Setup installer in silent per-user mode, so it
does not show dialogs during installation - it just quietly gets on with it.
Manual release
Download the latest assets from the
Releases page:
FastMediaSorter--windows-x64-setup.exe for the easiest installFastMediaSorter--windows-x64.zip for a portable offline bundle
Both assets contain both programs - the asset names have not changed.
The interactive setup can optionally register the app for common
image formats. On Windows 10/11, the system may still ask you to confirm the
choice once in Default Apps.
Both GitHub release assets are offline-ready: they already include VLC runtimes
and OCR language packs, so no first-run download is needed for media playback or
OCR recognition.
What's in the package (and why it's large)
The main program is a single ~110 MB exe because it carries its own .NET runtime -
that heft is exactly why there is nothing to install: the runtime comes along for
the ride instead of being demanded from your machine. (The 32-bit program beside it
is ~3 MB.) Most of the rest of the download is optional, offline-ready payload,
bundled so the app works with no first-run download:
- Video codecs (VLC) (~100 MB) - offline playback of AVI, MKV, VP9 and other
formats the built-in Windows player can't decode.
- OCR & translation models (~45 MB) - on-image text recognition without a
network round-trip.
- Android Folder Share companion (~120 MB) - a self-contained .NET app that
carries its own runtime (Windows does not ship the modern .NET it needs), used
to share folders to your phone. Being a 64-bit .NET 10 app itself, it is what
makes folder sharing a 64-bit-only feature, and setup skips it on Windows 7/8.1.
The bundled libraries are the 64-bit ones, for the main program. The 32-bit program
downloads the 32-bit codec and OCR pieces it needs on first use.
The interactive installer exposes these as selectable components and shows each
one's size: uncheck what you don't need and those parts download later on demand,
or the feature is simply left out. A viewer-only ("Compact") install is a fraction
of the full package. (Silent/winget installs always take the full set.)
Note: machine translation still depends on the provider you configure - the app
is generous, but it won't translate by sheer willpower. Ollama requires a
separate local install/model, while cloud providers need network access.
Companion App
For EPUB, PDF, FB2, MOBI, TXT, Markdown, and HTML document conversion, use the
companion project doc-html-translate:
winget install SerZhyAle.DocHtmlTranslate
Project page: doc-html-translate
Universal Agent Kit
A handy collection of AI-agent presets and tooling by the same author:
🔗 Universal Agent Kit
Author
- Website: sza.od.ua
- Email: sza@ukr.net
- Something misbehaves? Settings -> About -> "Send the logs to the author" packs the program logs
into an archive and opens a mail with it already attached. It shows you what is in the archive first,
and nothing is sent anywhere until you press Send in your own mail program.
License
MIT - see LICENSE.