Movie archive

Hi,

First time Hazel user, trying to figure this out.
I want Hazel to help with my family movie archive. just home movies of kids, etc... nothing fancy or professional.
Kind of like on this link (http://samdoran.com/organizing-movies-with-hazel/)

I am storing movie files in a simple file/folder structure on an external hard drive.

I tried to rename them as the date they were filmed (yyyymmdd) opposed to the file name assigned by the computer (for example img_2331.avi), so they organize chronologically in yearly folders.

When I did this to a few 'test' movies, the title changed just like I wanted, but the movies would not play/ weren't recognized. I assume this was because the (?)metadata no longer matched.

I suspect what I want to do is fairly common and an easy task for Hazel, I just couldn't get it to work.
Are the steps on that link above correct? Is there a preset option or prior posting that shows how to do this? searched the forum but couldn't find it.

Thanks very much,
Jon

Is it possible you are stripping the extension from the file? That's the part that tells the system what kind of file it is. In the rename action, make sure you have the extension attribute at the end. It's there by default but maybe you removed it?

Mr Noodle,
Great, you nailed it, that is exactly what I did wrong.
Movie files are working now.

However, when i tried to do the same thing for a test group of photos that I dragged from "PHOTOS" (formerly iPhoto) into folders in the finder window, the date that Hazel is renaming the files to... is today's date. I tried both the "date created" and "content created" elements. same result... today's date.

I am assuming that is because I dragged the pictures into the folder today.

hoping this is another simple error i am making.

thanks,
Jon

Check the dates after you move them since it depends on the program moving them whether certain dates get reset or not. Especially if doing a copy (which I'm guessing what happens when you drag out of Photos), chances are the copy will have a new creation date.

assuming that new dates are created once files are moved, how would I have Hazel work around that to have my files (i.e. pictures) labeled by the original date (i.e. date picture was taken)?

thanks,
Jon

You'd have to check other date fields on the movie to see if there's any of them that are intact. If you select the file in Finder and do "Get Info", you should see the available metadata there. Note that if these are jpgs and they have EXIF data, there is one exception that is not picked up by OS X which is the date taken. If you search the forum, you should be able to find a script which can extract that info and supply it back to Hazel.