Hazel-Scansnap Saving Issue

Here is my predicament. I have many Hazel rules that follow a format like this. Use content matching and rename the pdf file, move the file to a box.com nested folder and sort into years. These are documents and bills I typically scan with a scansnap ix500 printer or an iOS and save to a "action" folder on dropbox. Hazel watches the action folder on dropbox and typically works fine to move the files into the appropriate subfolder. The problem is this. When I scan documents with my scansnap, typically I don't use the scansnap manager to do anything accepting to OCR the document and save to the "action" folder. I don't change any filenames. My goal is to just save the file and then Hazel does it's thing. The problem is that Hazel does it's thing a couple of seconds after the page is scanned. So the scansnap software comes up and asks me what to do with the file...typically I say "Scan to File" and then I don't change the file name...and just save. Usually it saves to the same folder that was last saved to.

So what happens is that Hazel, recognizes the file, renames it, moves it and moves into the right subfolder before I actually save the document from scansnap manager. I can see the hazel notifications saying that the file was moved but then I can't save it because it isn't there anymore....really maybe not a Hazel problem but a scansnap one. So I end up having to "X" out of the scansnap manager as the file no longer exists.....it was already sucked out and moved. This adds a few extra steps but would like to figure out how to stop having to cancel the scansnap saves so I don't have to cancel? Hopefully this makes sense.

You can try adding a delay to the rule with a condition like "Date last modified is not in the last X minutes". Or you can make the rule not match unless a certain color label is assigned to it, which you can then add manually to the file when it's done scanning.

Wowsam,

I have a very similar setup with my scansnap, but I didn't happen to run into this issue because I've got it configured a little differently.

In scansnap manager, I have a profile that will scan the document with Abby Finereader for ScanSnap. The profile settings also allow for the file to be automatically saved in a specified folder with a filename based on the current time.

So... I have this profile setup as the default profile and when I hit the scan button the file automatically gets OCRd and saved in the folder of my choice with a unique filename.

It's simple to swap between profiles, so I think this should solve your problem.