How it works
What happens after
you point it.
There is no setup project and no filing system to design first. You choose what Ontiqo should look at, and it takes things from there — reading, learning the shape of your collection, and preparing a tidy-up it will not perform until you say so.
Point it at your files
At first run you choose the folders and connected accounts Ontiqo should read, and you see counts of what it found before anything starts. Anything optional that would go online is off until you switch it on, with its exact cost stated beside the switch. Then it begins — and from this moment until the day you commit, nothing on your disk is moved, renamed or written to.
It reads everything, properly
Documents are read in full, every page. Scanned pages are read as if they were typed. Photos are looked at and described — what is in the picture, and any words visible in it. Recordings are listened to, and the speech in them becomes text. Archives, discs and programs are identified for what they are. Everything converges on the same goal: knowing each file well enough to place it.
You can watch it happen. The processing view shows the counts, the pace, and anything that needs a human — and if the numbers say a big collection will take days of background reading, that is what it says.
Files understood
12,884 of 19,022
15,204 already searchable · reading about 5 files a minute
roughly 20 hours to go, at the pace of the last few hours
The processing view, on an example collection. Without a graphics card the pace is roughly half a recommended machine’s.
It works out your collection's structure
Once it has seen enough, Ontiqo derives the groupings your collection actually supports — from the files themselves, not from a template. A grouping earns its place by being genuinely shared across many files; a label that only ever describes one file can never become a folder. The result is a structure in your collection's own vocabulary, with plain folder names a person would choose.
This happens automatically and asks you nothing. If you want to rename or reshape what it found, that is a tweak later, never a form first.
Everything gets a place, or a shelf
Each file is filed by what it is. And what cannot be confidently placed is never hidden to make the tree look finished: files still being read, files that genuinely need a human decision, duplicate copies, and application clutter each sit on their own clearly-marked shelf at the bottom of the tree, with counts. The review pile is kept deliberately short — your attention is a cost Ontiqo spends carefully, not a workflow it builds on.
You adjust, then commit — reversibly
The proposal is yours to disagree with. Drag a folder somewhere better, move a file by hand — the header changes from Organised by Ontiqo to Organised by you, and your changes stick even if Ontiqo later refines the rest. When you like it, you commit: in place, or into a new folder with the original untouched. The commit sheet states the full extent of what is about to happen before it happens.
Every commit is journalled and reversible, and a plain-language undo record is written into your own Documents folder — outside Ontiqo, so uninstalling can never take it with it. Beside it sits a double-click undo that needs nothing installed — not Ontiqo, not anything — and puts every file back where it was. For files in a cloud account, where undoing needs your sign-in, any copy of Ontiqo downloaded fresh months later reads the same record and does it.
Then it stays useful — or gets out of the way
After the tidy-up, Ontiqo is a browser for your collection. Regroup the same files into any view — by project, by year, by person — without anything moving. Search in plain sentences, and find a recording by what was said in it or a scan by what was printed on it. Ask a question and get an answer that cites the actual files it came from.
Or uninstall it. Nothing of Ontiqo remains on your system — and because the undo record sits in your own Documents with its own double-click undo beside it, the way back survives too: for files on your machine, run it and the commit unwinds with nothing installed; for a cloud account, reinstall whenever and point Ontiqo at the record.
quotes final(2).xlsx
Comparison of three fencing quotes — $4,180 on the summary sheet.
scan_0112.pdf
A scanned quote for timber fencing, read from the scan itself.
Voice memo 018.m4a
"…he reckons four grand if we do the gate too…"
Search by meaning, across everything it has read, seen and heard.
Where it sits
Three kinds of tool.
Plenty of programs help with files, and most of them are good at what they do. They are just answering different questions. Here is the layout of the ground, and where Ontiqo stands on it.
Search tools
Windows Search, and the file finders
They answer where is that one file? — and modern ones answer it well. Windows can now find a photo from a description of it rather than its filename, on your own machine.
What none of them change is the collection. The mess is exactly as deep after the search as before it, and it grows every year. Searching is a way of living with disorder — a good one, but you have to keep doing it.
Sorters and renamers
The tidy-my-Downloads tools
They answer can something file this for me? — and for a folder of recent downloads, they do. They sort into categories they arrived with, or into a scheme you describe to them first, and they rename as they go.
The limits show at scale and at depth. You have to know the filing system you want before you start; the categories come from the tool or from you, not from what is actually there. Most read documents and pictures but not what was said in a recording, and many work in batches of a few hundred or a few thousand files, often sending them to a cloud service to be read.
Ontiqo
Collection-scale organisation
It answers what is in here, and how should it be arranged? — for the whole collection at once, however old and however large.
It reads everything it can, including what was said in recordings and what is in photographs, and works the structure out from the contents rather than bringing one with it or asking you to invent one. Then it proposes the whole arrangement, waits for you, and only moves files when you say so — with the way back written into your own Documents folder.
Finding things afterwards comes free, because it has already read everything. That is the part these three have in common; the difference is that for Ontiqo it is a side-effect rather than the point.
If your files are broadly in order and you just need to find one, a search tool is the right answer and costs you nothing. Ontiqo is for the collection that stopped being in order some years ago.
What to expect
Honest answers take real time.
It is a background worker, not a wizard
Reading a lifetime of files properly takes hours on a small collection and days on a huge one — Ontiqo tells you the pace and gets on with it. It runs politely at low priority: when you are presenting, gaming or on battery it steps aside entirely, and it catches up when the machine is idle.
Useful long before it is finished
You do not wait for the end. Files become searchable as they are read, the first quick pass gives everything a rough label early, and the proposed structure appears once enough is understood — then keeps improving as the rest is read.
The same answers on every machine
Ontiqo never trades quality for hardware. A faster machine — or one with a powerful graphics card — finishes sooner; it does not get better answers. A modest laptop gets the same understanding, later.
The edges are reported, not smoothed
Some files cannot be read — password-protected archives, damaged documents, formats nothing can open. They are named, counted and shown, never silently dropped. When Ontiqo does not know, it says so in words.
The network, precisely
What goes online, and what never does.
Never
The content of your files. All reading, understanding and organising happens on your own computer. There is no cloud processing, no account, and your file content is never sent to us — that claim is written into the licence itself, not just this page.
Only if you choose it, and it says what it sends
A few optional lookups can consult public references — identifying an unusual file type, a published book or recording. Each is off until you switch it on, and the switch states exactly what would be sent. Signing in to a connected cloud source talks to that provider, on your account, to fetch your own files. And on the paid edition, activating a licence key checks the key — nothing else.