This is an ask (maybe a bit of a contest ) for some design chops.
Setup:
I have a lot of old emails that I need to bring more order to within various folders.
As a first step I’m going to order them by date. The metadata for date sorting is gone so I’m going to open them one by one (ugh) and find when the email was written and add that date to the beginning of the file name then sort by name.
Typing the date is more (ugh) so I whipped up a quick date slug generator with a Keyboard Maestro palette. What I made with my limited knowledge of programming works BUT, I’d like to see if anyone can do it more elegantly and of course more heads (in my case almost any head) is better than one.
Here’s my simple solution.
The UI is this:
And the macros are this:
This puts the year at the beginning of the file name.
I've stayed up too late already so I can't examine this in detail right now but I wondered about this:
If the emails have intact headers you could perhaps use Read a File and then get the date using regex matching. Perhaps. It could take a while to work out… Good practice though!
My instinct would be to copy the filename, transform it as needed and then paste the result back in.
I'm sorry I can't study this more at the moment, but I'm sure somebody else will provide a proper analysis and ideas soon!
Roughly how many? If it's more than 20, the method you are describing sounds like a total nightmare to me (and I'm someone who likes repetitive tasks ).
Like @kevinb is saying, the first thing I would do is try any method to automate getting the date from each file. If that can't be done maybe a method to copy and format the date using OCR rather than having to do it by eye each time.
And if you have the file selected in the Finder you can combine its name with the date and rename all without using clipboards or arrow keys using Keyboard Maestro's rename file Action:
The spirit behind offering something to not leave a gap in the communication is generous. And generosity is an expression of caring that seems in short supply these days.