01What BARF is, and how to get around
Rather than asking you to sort photo by photo, BARF groups your photos into moments — clusters based on time and location, roughly “things that happened together” — and then, for each moment, suggests which OneDrive folder it probably belongs in, based on matching things like the month and year against your existing folder names.
The workflow has four steps, and they map directly onto the four main screens:
- Scan — BARF reads your Photos library and your OneDrive folders, and works out which moments are candidates for filing.
- Desk — a summary view of how much there is to review.
- Review — you go through each moment and decide where it goes (or create a new folder for it).
- Commit — your decisions are actually carried out: photos are converted and copied into the right OneDrive folders.
There's also a Folders screen for browsing the OneDrive folders BARF already knows about. The sidebar lists all five screens; there's no search or global keyboard shortcuts outside of Review. You can switch between Night and Stone display modes by clicking the reactor icon in the sidebar.
Before you dive in
BARF is a genuinely new and still-maturing tool, and the step that actually moves and converts your files — Commit — has a couple of known issues that mean a real Commit shouldn't be run yet.
Dry runs (which don't touch any files) are completely safe and worth using freely. See the Commit section below for the full detail and what to do in the meantime.
02Scan — finding and scoring your photos
Scan is where everything starts. You point it at your OneDrive Photos root folder (there's a sensible default already filled in), hit “Run scan,” and BARF reads through your entire Photos library and your existing OneDrive folders, clusters your photos into moments, and scores each moment against your folder names to suggest where it probably belongs.
On a large library, this genuinely takes a long time — potentially several hours — so it's worth kicking off before you step away rather than watching it.
- The progress display can look stuck at points, even though it's still working. During the longest phases, the progress counter can sit on the same number for a long stretch — that's normal, not a freeze, though there's currently no cancel button if you do want to stop it.
- A scan currently starts your review progress over. If you've already made decisions in Review, running another scan will re-cluster everything from scratch and those decisions won't carry forward. Treat Scan as something you run once and then work through fully.
- The OneDrive folder path needs to be typed in full each time — it doesn't remember a custom path between app launches.
- Once the scan finishes, you're taken straight to the Desk — the results summary (including how many photos were already correctly filed) isn't visible again afterwards, so it's worth a glance before navigating away.
Tip
Run your first scan as a trial to get a feel for timing and results before doing your “real” full scan — and don't run a second scan until you've either finished reviewing everything from the first one, or you're comfortable re-doing that review work.
03Desk and Review — the daily home screen and the core review loop
Desk is your landing screen after a scan: four tiles giving you a rough shape of what's waiting — things confidently matched, things that need a look, new events, and a “leftovers” style bucket — plus a one-line total of your folders, moments and photos. Two things to know: the numbers on Desk are a snapshot from when you last scanned, so they don't count down as you work through Review. And currently, only two of the four tiles actually lead anywhere when you click into Review — use Desk as a rough orientation rather than a literal to-do list.
Review is where the real work happens, one moment at a time. Each card shows a contact sheet of thumbnails, the date range, place and any people BARF recognises, followed by up to three suggested folders (each with a confidence bar) plus an “Already here” option, or a way to create a brand-new folder if none of the suggestions fit.
- The confidence bar doesn't show you why a folder was suggested — mostly it's just a matching month and year, so treat a suggestion as “worth a look,” not as a strong recommendation, and always glance at the thumbnails before accepting.
- When creating a new folder, double-check the suggested name before hitting Enter — the auto-suggested name can occasionally include a stray character.
- If a moment has more photos than shown in the thumbnail grid, there's currently no reliable indicator of how many extra there are — assume there may be more than what you see.
- “Skip” doesn't reduce the remaining count — a skipped moment comes back around later rather than being crossed off.
Tip
Review in focused sessions rather than trying to get through everything at once — with a large photo library this can be hundreds of decisions, and it's designed to be done a chunk at a time.
04Commit — filing photos into OneDrive
Commit is the final step: it takes every decision you made in Review and actually carries it out — converting photos to JPEG and copying them into the right OneDrive folders. The screen shows a dry-run summary first (files to file, new folders that would be created, how many are already filed, how many HEIC photos will convert to JPEG, and roughly how much disk space it'll use), and only once you're happy do you press “Commit” to run it for real.
Please don't press the real Commit button yet
The dry run is completely safe to run as often as you like — it doesn't touch any files and is a good way to sanity-check your Review decisions. But a real Commit currently has a couple of rough edges that could cause real problems with your photo files, and it's best avoided until these are fixed:
• If the OneDrive folder path isn't typed in exactly as an absolute path in that session, Commit can end up writing your photos to the wrong place entirely.
• If a Commit is interrupted partway through, there's currently no reliable way to pick up where it left off — running it again from scratch can result in duplicate copies of files that were already filed.
• There's no “undo” for a completed Commit yet, and no staging step — files go straight into your live OneDrive folders.
None of this affects your original photos in Apple Photos — they're never touched or deleted by BARF, only read from. The risk is specifically around getting duplicates or misplaced copies in OneDrive.
For now: it's completely fine, and genuinely useful, to work through Scan, Desk and Review as normal to build up your decisions — just hold off on pressing the real “Commit N files” button until these fixes have landed. I'll let you know when that's the case.
Tip
Use the dry run's numbers as a sanity check on your Review session — if “new folders” looks a lot higher than you'd expect, it's worth going back into Review to check you haven't accidentally created a duplicate folder with a slightly different name.
05Folders — browsing your OneDrive photo folders
Folders gives you a flat list of every OneDrive folder BARF knows about — likely a couple of hundred if your archive goes back a while — each showing its name, a rough “kind” classification, and how many photos BARF has matched to it so far. There's no search or filtering on this list yet, so with a lot of folders it's more of a scroll-and-skim screen than a quick lookup.
Clicking into a folder shows its detail: the kind classification (which you can correct if BARF has guessed wrong), and lists of what's already filed there and what's currently waiting in Review for that folder.
- The “filed” count on a folder detail page is capped at 200, even if the real number is higher — treat it as “200 or more” for your bigger folders.
- Correcting a folder's “kind” doesn't immediately re-score anything on its own — there's a separate “Re-score” action, and running it re-checks the whole library against every folder, so it can take a little while.
Tip
If you're ever unsure whether a folder already exists before creating a new one during Review, it's worth a quick check on this screen first — BARF doesn't currently catch near-duplicate folder names for you.
06Tips, shortcuts and things to know
Keyboard shortcuts on the Review screen
- 1, 2, 3 — accept the corresponding suggested folder
- N — switch to creating a new folder
- S — skip this moment for now
- ← — undo your last decision
- Enter — confirm a new folder name you've typed
One shortcut to know doesn't currently work: the “Already here” merge action has a documented Shift+1/2/3 shortcut, but it doesn't fire reliably — use the “Already here” button on screen instead for now.
A suggested workflow
- Run a Scan (ideally overnight or while you're away).
- Work through Review in manageable sessions — your decisions are saved as you go, as long as you don't run a fresh Scan in between.
- Use Commit's dry run freely to check your numbers look sensible.
- Hold off on a real Commit until the safety issues mentioned earlier are resolved — check in if you're unsure.
- Use Folders whenever you want to sanity-check a folder name or see what's already filed somewhere. - Undo only lasts for your current session — closing and reopening BARF loses the ability to undo older decisions, even though they're safely saved. - There's no privacy or screen-blur mode on any screen — Review shows family photo thumbnails at all times, so it's not the ideal screen for a screen-share. - There isn't a settings screen yet for things like the OneDrive folder path or teaching BARF nicknames for people in your photos. - A meaningful slice of your photos — the most confident matches, and small “leftover” moments — don't currently have a dedicated review screen of their own. They're counted on the Desk but there's no direct way to work through them yet.
BARF is genuinely one of the newer apps in the suite, so expect more rough edges here than elsewhere — none of them put your original photos at risk, since BARF only ever reads from Apple Photos and never modifies or deletes anything there. The caution is specifically around the Commit step into OneDrive, covered earlier in this guide.