Using PlumageSort
Last updated 19 September 2026
PlumageSort suggests what bird is in a photograph and files it accordingly. It is an assistant rather than an authority, and it moves your files. Both are worth understanding before you rely on it.
The licence
PlumageSort is licensed to you, not sold. One licence covers one machine. You can release that machine from within the app at any time and activate another in its place — so changing or replacing your computer does not cost you your licence.
Identifications are probabilistic
The app names a species only when its confidence passes a threshold you choose, and routes everything else to an Uncertain folder rather than guessing. Even so, a named identification is a machine's best estimate and will sometimes be wrong, particularly between species that closely resemble one another.
Do not rely on it as the sole basis for scientific records, survey submissions, or any decision where being wrong carries a cost. Check its work; the review page exists for that.
It moves your photographs
Sorting moves files from the folder you choose into folders it creates. It does not delete photographs and does not modify their contents, but they are no longer where they were.
Keep a backup. Software has defects, storage fails, and a large sort is a large number of file operations. Your backups are your responsibility, and this app is not a substitute for one.
Photographs
Photographs are bought outright. A batch is yours once it is paid for, and there is no subscription, no renewal and no billing period: nothing to cancel and nothing to keep an eye on.
They do not expire. Buying a batch early never wastes it. When one is spent, sorting pauses and records where it stopped so it can resume once you buy more.
How photographs are counted. A photograph is one press of the shutter. A batch of 500 covers 500 of them, so the figure on the pricing page is a ceiling rather than an estimate. A RAW and a JPEG of the same shot are counted as one, and a photograph the app cannot confidently name is counted like any other — it was read and examined either way.
The free trial is counted differently, in species rather than photographs: ten different birds, so a long burst of one bird spends one of the ten. It also carries a photograph limit as a backstop, set well above what ten species normally takes, so that a single very large run cannot extend the trial indefinitely.
Acceptable use
Don't redistribute or resell the app, don't attempt to extract or repackage the bundled species model, and don't use it where its failure could endanger anyone. Beyond that, the photographs you sort are yours and what you do with them is your business.
Your content
Your photographs remain entirely yours. The app claims no licence over them and, as the Privacy Policy sets out, never transmits them anywhere.
Updates
The app checks this site for updates and offers them. It never installs one without asking: it moves your photographs, and swapping the program underneath a running sort is not a risk worth taking to save a click.
Warranty and liability
The software is provided as it is, without warranty beyond what the law requires. Nothing here limits liability for death, personal injury, fraud, or anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded — and where your local consumer law gives you stronger rights, those apply.