Hazel is probably the greatest never-think-about-it application for the Mac I know of. She doesn’t get talked about enough, so that’s what this post is: me talking about her. . . I mean it.
It’s also a selfish attempt at learning more about my favorite Mac maid… ‘cause I get the feeling I’m still not using her—it. . . it, dammit—enough. Let me know how you use Hazel in the comments.
How I use Hazel… mostly
Download folder management:
- Delete files older than one day
- Securely delete certain file types (e.g. banking QFX files after 30 minutes)
- Automatic filing of specific that I routinely download (e.g. XML blog post backups)1
- Automatically filing financial statements with a little help from TextExpander
Desktop management:
- Move screenshots with a
-pesuffix to a folder2 - Delete screenshots (i.e. files containing
screen shotin the name) that are older than one day
Random:
- Delete files in Trash older than one week
- App sweep (i.e. deleting miscellaneous system files used by applications that I delete)
- Wirelessly importing iPhone photos into iPhoto or Aperture
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If you regularly download any kind of file and manually move it to another folder, you should go buy Hazel now. I’m not joking. End that madness. ↩
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I usually put
-peon the end of screenshots that I use in posts here. I like working off of my Desktop when I’m cropping and annotating screenshots. If a-pescreenshot sits on my Desktop more than 30 minutes, Hazel puts it in a folder for me so I can use it later. ↩
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Monitor a folder in my Dropbox, and automatically import its contents into iTunes on my home iTunes media server — one library to rule them all.
Monitor a video folder and automatically convert video files to mp4 format using HandbrakeCLI
Send an email with a URL to Simplenote from my iPhone/iPad with the subject CHROME. Simplenote syncs to Dropbox. Hazel opens the link in Chrome on my Mac.
Monitor a folder for PDFs. When found, opened with Acrobat, run OCR & save.
When running Parallels, monitor various network folders & copy locally to Mac.
I got into Hazel after following Mac Power Users. (it was David Sparks who led me to this post as well). @David R: can you shed a bit of light on how you achieve the iTunes import from Dropbox? I’m ripping my DVD collection just now and haven’t been able to figure out a Hazel rule to do exactly what you are talking about.
I have the issue where moving things based on date modified sometimes moves or deletes things right after I download them, because the date modified is set to a far time in the past. Any suggestions on how to avoid this?
Use Date Added instead of Date Modified.
I use hazel in so many ways.
I use NValt to manage my task list and I use hazel to assign and modify the simplenote tags of my notes. When I tag a todo “Done” hazel moves it to a date based archive folder tree.
I use a series of Hazel rules to add the correct metadata and artwork to recorded tv shows and then add them to iTunes.
So many more, hazel is my favorite app on my ac without question.
Delete files older than 2 weeks from the .Dropbox.cache folder.
Clear out OmniFocus backups older than 2 weeks.
Monitor a folder in Dropbox for text files and use AppleScript to add it to OmniFocus.
Thanks for reminding me about using Hazel to manage OmniFocus backups. I have been meaning to do that.
I have an Hazel rule on my applications folder that highlights new applications in green so that I don’t forget to try them out (sometimes I will download a few apps in a day for review or whatever and don’t always remember to get back to some of them).
I also have a rule that moves video files from my downloads folder that are up to 650mb to my TV folder and over 700mb to my movies folder.
I have a rule to move any DMG files into an Applications folder in my downloads folder and another rule on that Applications folder that labels a DMG once I run it. That way I can tell when I checked the folder whether I ran the updates or installed the app. Plus after x amount of days, the grey labeled files are deleted.
Some great tips here – just starting out with Hazel so getting these hooked up right now.
One thing I really want to nail… screenshot, open png with Skitch, delete png. Managed this. But I want to automate the conversion to jpeg. Is there a simple solution for this?
Many thanks,
Jon
Yes. You can create an Automator workflow to convert the image and have Hazel run the workflow for you.