I'm a bit of a neophyte at this amazing program, and have zero scripting skill. Though I'm beginning to think I need to get some.
I do a lot of scanning, and most of what I scan gets sorted into one of 20-30 client subfolders. I add a client name or file number to every file as it's saved by the scanner, but I still have the dreary task of sorting them all into their appropriate folders from time to time. I haven't found a better way to speed this up than to add a Hazel rule corresponding to every single new folder name as they're added, but this winds up being really cumbersome.
The grail would be a KM folder watcher that compares each new file to a dynamic subfolder list that it queries, and sorts the new file into the matching subfolder (if it finds a match).
Is this possible? Is it easy, and I'm just a dope that I can't for the life of me figure out how to do it?
Each open file has its own folder, named with a unique convention, like ~/OPEN/CLIE0001, ~/OPEN/ANTT1234, and so on. Additionally I maintain a dozen or so other folders that regularly take input.
Once a day (if I’m being good):
I scan a couple dozen physical docs into a dedicated folder, call it ~/DOCUMENTS/SCAN. Each of these is associated with one of the open client files.
At some point in the scanning workflow I apply the unique convention to each file: ANTT1234_20181128.pdf. The only reason I do this is to facilitate sorting.
Then I sort them all into their various folders, i.e. DOCUMENTS/SCAN/ANTT1234.20181128.PDF → ~/OPEN/ANTT1234/ANTT1234_20181128.pdf
This process, besides being tedious, means I wind up with redundant info in the filenames (no need to have the folder and each file in the folder named the same way).
I would like to automate as much of this process as possible. I could have a Hazel rule pertaining to each of these folders, but I’d have to change them with every new open file and it would be a headache.
I have been experimenting with KM for possible solutions—maybe a folder watcher that, upon detecting a new file, queries the ~/OPEN folder and populates the subfolders into a palette, then moves the file and applies an appropriate filename upon selection.
But I wouldn’t want to create this palette manually, folder by folder, and have to change it with every client file added or closed. For the same reason, if it’s very hard to knock something like this together it’s probably not worth doing. I’m probably better off just adding a bunch of Hazel rules to my file-opening workflow.