Table of Contents Hazel a tool for automating your Mac...2 1 Introduction...2 2 Basic setup... 2 2.1 The Folders tab... 2 2.2 The Trash tab... 5 2.3 The Info tab...6 3 Use Hazel to manage your digital supplies...7 3.1 Basic folder move... 7 3.2 Working your way into subfolders... 9
Hazel a tool for automating your Mac 1 Introduction Hazel is an automation tool for your Mac. It is your housekeeper, doing what keeps you from using more time on scrapbooking. All it requires is a little setup, and it will be happy to do that boring stuff for you. Follow along, and I'll give you a quick tutorial on how to use Hazel. 2 Basic setup 2.1 The Folders tab The first window that meets you after installing and opening Hazel is the Folders tab. As a default, it will suggest some basic rule set up for your Desktop. I recommend importing them, and then turning these off until you are sure you want to use them.
You can see that in this setup, Hazel will throw away (delete) duplicate files from the Desktop. In the area below, you have the sample rules that Hazel has set up for you. Let's take a quick look at the Movies rule. The field called description is just what you call the rule to know what it does. Below begins the fun. It says here that if all of the following conditions are met: Kind is Movie (which just means that the file is a movie) then Hazel will 1. Put a blue color label on the file 2. Move this file from your Desktop to the folder Movies (in your home folder) This is a rule that will help you keep your Desktop tidy, and place your Movies where they belong. Of course, you can change which folder you want the Movies to be moved to.
If you press the Options arrow in the bottom of the window, and you will get these choices: Here you can specify if you want to throw away (delete) duplicates, and more, if the file already exists, you can either rename the new file or replace the old file. If you tick the «Throw away if a duplicate», I'm guessing that the rename/replace option is not doing anything.
2.2 The Trash tab The next tab is the Trash tab. Here you can specify in which intervals you want Hazel to clean up your Trash. I have mine set to permanently delete all files that have been in the Trash for more than 12 hours. If you are not very comfortable with cleaning up your Trash that often, you can change this. But my advice is to take out the Trash on a regular basis to keep it from smelling in other words keeping your Mac a faster and happier machine. You can also choose if you want normal or secure file delete. Secure file delete means that it will be more difficult to restore. This is normally not very important unless you work for the CIA or another organization that needs to keep things secret. Computer geeks can restore files that you think have been deleted in mysterious ways. The secure delete is a way to prevent this. Below that is the App Sweep. This is one of Hazel's automatic ways to tidy your computer. If you decide that you no longer need an application, you would normally drag it to the
Trash. That will in many cases leave files left behind on your Mac. What Hazel does in App Sweep, is removing these left over files. This is recommended, as a tidy Mac, without useless files, is a happy Mac. Also, if you are two or more sharing the Mac, you'd want to turn on multi-user sweep to clean up after their mess, so to say. (Haven't we all been there?) 2.3 The Info tab The last tab is the Info tab, that just shows info about Hazel, if you want it to show up in the status bar, and how often it should check for updates. I recommend checking daily. That's the basic setup. Now over to the fun part making Hazel your digital supplies manager.
3 Use Hazel to manage your digital supplies 3.1 Basic folder move When I download digital supplies, one of the things that take time (in addition to tagging), is moving them to the right folder. That's where Hazel can help. By setting up rules, Hazel will move the folders to the correct place on your Mac, or to an EHD. Let's have a look at one example setup. What I want, is for folders containing papers from designer Andrea Victoria to place themselves in this subfolder on my EHD: 1DD/AVictoria/1Papers First, I have to show Hazel what folder to look in to find these digital supplies. I have a designated folder for my digital downloads called 0downloads. So first, I click on the little +-sign on the left side of Hazel (marked with a red circle), to import this folder: (Here it's already imported, and highlighted with blue.)
Andrea Victoria paper pack folders normally contain «papers» or «solids» as part of the folder name, and she always puts AVictoria in the beginning of the folder name. These things are what I use to set up the automatic folder move. Here I'm moving the paper packs that include «papers». I set up this rule with the following conditions: 1. Name starts with AVictoria- 2. Name contains papers The result is: Move file (folder) to folder 1Papers. Here I have to work my way down to «Other» by clicking the small arrows behind the folder option and manually choose this folder by browsing to it. I would recommend to not tick «Throw away if a duplicate» and «If file exists», choose «replace». That way, if you got a corrupt/incomplete download, when you download the new folder, you'll replace the old one. It's important that you write everything correctly. This will not work if you write avictoria, or avictoria or in any way have a spelling error so that the words don't match.
3.2 Working your way into subfolders Now, what if you want to go inside subfolders, how do you do that? Well, then you have to make a rule that looks inside subfolders. For instance, if you want to copy all your previews to a designated folder, you have to look inside all folders and find those previews. I'm now operating on a folder called 0extracted, which contains folders for all the designers on DesignerDigitals: First you tell Hazel to look inside the subfolders like this: Here I have excluded the folder called previews, as I do not want to copy the preview files already copied to this folder again. This assumes that your previews folder is inside the top level folder that you're copying the previews from. (My top level folder is here 0extracted.
This is the folder the rules apply on.) Next, I create the rule that copies the previews. Now, Hazel will look through all the subfolders to find previews (normally the previews contain PREV, so that's what I've searched for here), and copy (not move) them to the designated previews folder. I hope this was a helpful introduction to some of the things Hazel can do for you.