VaultSort 3 is Here — Smart Categorize Has Shipped

We promised a local-AI engine that reads your files and proposes categories from your actual library. Today it ships.

VaultSort 3 is live. Smart Categorize is the headline. Everything we said it would do, it does — privately, on-device, with zero data leaving your Mac.

What "It Just Works" Actually Looks Like

You point Smart Categorize at a folder. About two seconds later you see something like this:

Audits — 52 files
Examples: NC_audit.txt · UT_audit.txt · DE_audit.txt

Officeholders — 43 files
Examples: officeholder-summary-2026-03-23.csv · …

Invoices — 38 files
Examples: Contract-Invoice-Sep2025.pdf · …

USAH — 22 files
Examples: USAH03B80N25.pdf · …

Presets — 52 files
Examples: PresetTree.xml · AMEPrefs.xml · …

These are your categories — derived from your files. Not a fixed list of "Documents / Downloads / Pictures." Not Shopping vs. Travel vs. Misc. The actual themes that exist in your library.

You accept what you like, rename what you don't, drop what doesn't belong, and Smart Categorize routes the rest of your library into those folders — with the same dry-run preview and undo support every other VaultSort job has had since day one.

How It's Different From Everything Else

Most "AI file organizers" do one of two things:

1. Send your files to a cloud API. Convenient, expensive, and your files leave your machine.

2. Match filenames against a pre-baked list of buckets. Fast, free, and dumb — scan_0042.pdf lands in "Misc" forever.

VaultSort 3 does neither.

A small (~470 MB, downloaded once) embedding model runs locally on your Apple Neural Engine. It reads PDFs, ePubs, Word, plain text, Markdown, code — extracting actual content, embedding it into a semantic vector space, then clustering to surface the categories that genuinely live in your library.

No API key. No cloud. No subscription. The model verifies its own checksum at install and never phones home.

Built Into Advanced Organize, Not Bolted On

Smart Categorize isn't a separate app or a new tab — it's a first-class condition in the Advanced Organize Rule Builder you already use. That means:

• semanticCategory is now a rule predicate. Combine it with filename, date, size, extension, tag, and every other condition.

  • "If semanticCategory is Receipts AND size > 500 KB, move to /Receipts/Large."

  • "If semanticCategory is Audits AND extension = .txt, move to /Work/Audits/Plain and tag archive."

• Saved Category Sets. Curate once, reuse across jobs.

• Scheduled jobs. Set Smart Categorize to run nightly on your ~/Downloads and never touch it again.

• Dry-run preview before anything moves.

• Undo if you don't like what happened.

If you've used VaultSort's Advanced Organize before, you already know how Smart Categorize behaves. It's a new kind of input for the same trusted pipeline.

What Got Better Along the Way

VaultSort 3 isn't just Smart Categorize. The release shipped with:

• A redesigned Advanced Organize UI — cleaner, more guided, easier to navigate as the rule and job system has grown.

• Order-independent derive output. Same folders → same proposals, regardless of how you select them.

• Smarter naming — USAH stays USAH; Children doesn't become Childs; Knives doesn't become Knifes; calendar months and "last" / "copy" / "draft" suffixes never crown a category.

• Tighter junk-drawer behaviour — loose .md / .txt clusters need real cohesion or they merge into Uncategorized rather than cluttering your review.

• Schema-versioned Category Sets — forward-compatible loading so today's saves keep working tomorrow.

Full changelog at vaultsort.com/change-log.

What's Next

Smart Categorize is the foundation. The embedding cache it builds quietly powers what's coming next:

• AI-powered renaming — title, author, year, DOI extracted from document metadata, with optional Gemini polish for stubborn cases.

• Semantic search — find the report you're thinking of without remembering the filename.

• More file types — image, audio, and video classification on the roadmap.

A Note on Replacing CleanMyMac

Last week Mac Automation Lab wrote about VaultSort's ambition to replace the cleanup-tool category for serious Mac users. Smart Categorize is the proof. CleanMyMac sweeps caches and trash. VaultSort 3 reads your library and gives you a private, programmable, scheduled organization engine that respects your data. That's not a competing feature — that's a different category.

VaultSort is positioning itself as the standard for file organization on macOS. Smart Categorize is the moment that claim becomes real.

How to Get It

If you're already on VaultSort 2.x, VaultSort 3 is a free upgrade — open the app and the update will appear.

If you've been on the fence, the launch-week pricing is the cheapest VaultSort will ever be. Use code VS3LAUNCH at checkout for 25% off through May 14.

👉 vaultsort.com/purchase

The Ask

If Smart Categorize saves you an afternoon, tell one person. If it doesn't, hit reply and tell me. I read every message.

Stay organized,
Justin
VaultSort

Keywords: VaultSort 3, Smart Categorize, on-device AI, local AI file organization, macOS file manager, Apple Silicon, semantic categorization, CleanMyMac alternative, Advanced Organize, embedding-based clustering.