Is this possible - photos management

Hi all,

I am looking at Hazel as an option to help me with my photo workflow management and was wondering if Hazel can maybe meet those requirements.

What I ultimately want the workflow to do:

1. Recognise that I have inserted an SD card
2. Copy the files to structured directories (/Photos/<YYYY>/<MM-DD>) on my Macbook
3. Copy the files to the same structure on my NAS (from here they are sync'd with offsite backup)
4. Import the images into Photos app as a referenced image (not copy them into the Photos library)
5. Delete the images from the SD card

Are all/some of these possible with Hazel? From reading around it seems a good chunk of it should be and could be paired with Apple Image Capture to do some bits of not.

Seems doable though it depends. For instance, if we are talking about any SD card (and not just the same one mounted at the same spot each time), then it might require some scripting logic to distinguish that from any other drive you connect.

Some notes to help you:

1. If it's the same SD card, it should mount at the same path each time. You can add that folder to Hazel to monitor. If it's any arbitrary card, you'll need to monitor /Volumes (it's normally hidden in the file dialog so type it in (when you enter "/", a new text box will appear where you can enter the rest of it). You'll also need to tell Hazel to go into subfolders as described here: https://www.noodlesoft.com/kb/going-into-subfolders/

2 & 3. Now there are a details needed here to guide you on how to do this. For instance, what if the same card is inserted, do you want to overwrite everything that was there before? Only new files?

I suggest giving it a try and reporting back with specific issues. I also recommend using test files until you have it sorted out.

Thanks Mr Noodle for the help.

To get started, I've got Apple Image Capture reading the SD card and sticking the images in a "Import" directory. Hazel is monitoring that and then sticking it into my dated directories, its then putting them into Photos. This is all working, however one slight snag - RAW + JPEGs. As Hazel sees these as 2 files, I'm guessing it runs two imports to get them into the library and as such ends up as 2 images in Photos. However a direct import into Photos from the app means it merges them and shows them as a single photo while knowing its actually 2 files.

Any way to get Hazel to import RAW+JPEG together?

On a similar note, as it does an import per image, "Last Import" only shows one image, it would be better to be able to have all the images its just moved as a batch shown. Is there a way to get it to import them all together?

There's no way to batch import or import the two files together. You might want to look into messing around with Applescript but even then, I've found Photos' AppleScript support to be a bit under-developed so it may not be possible.