Hazel Not Triggering Rules when New Files Arrive over FTP

Hello! I've searched the forums and googled, but haven't seemed to find a solution to what I'm seeing.

I have a webcam that sends a JPEG to a specific folder on my computer every 30 seconds. It does this over FTP. I bought Hazel with the idea that Hazel could watch this folder and every time a file appeared in it, it could move that file to a semantically-usefully-named directory and thus sort the thousands & thousands of images for me on the fly.

Good news: the rule works great. When run, the rule sorts the pictures the way I want it to.

Bad news: it doesn't run automatically. That is, nothing is sorted unless I open Hazel in System Preferences and choose "Run Rules Now" from the cog menu. I want the whole process to be hands-free so this is kind of a dealbreaker.

Is there something I'm missing or doing wrong? Or some workaround I could use? Thanks!

Details:
OS X 10.10 (Server)
Running newest Hazel (3.3.7)

Settings here:

It's a limitation imposed by OS X. For some reason, FTP on OS X doesn't trigger the file events that Hazel (and other apps) need to respond to changes. How often do you need this to happen? There might be some tricks you can do to work around this.

Mr_Noodle wrote:It's a limitation imposed by OS X. For some reason, FTP on OS X doesn't trigger the file events that Hazel (and other apps) need to respond to changes. How often do you need this to happen? There might be some tricks you can do to work around this.

To get around this in OS X Server's FTP Server, I created an AppleScript that updated a tmp text file in the FTP directory every few seconds. This triggered something in the OS to refresh the Finder display of the folder (which showed no uploaded files, even though they had been received by the FTP server), which allowed Hazel to run.

The other solution was using a different FTP Server. PureFTPd doesn't install on El Capitan, but I tried the trial of Rumpus, and it appears to work (with no AppleScript needed).

Mr. Noodle - What other workarounds do you suggest? I'm surprised that OS X Server FTP Server doesn't send notifications when receiving files. Seems like an obvious thing to do.

Actually, in Hazel 4, there's a hidden feature. First off, please do not use this until you have contacted me and determined it is the only workaround.

If you hold down the option key while right-clicking a folder, there will be a new option to have Hazel run periodically on that folder. If you select that, Hazel will run every few minutes on that folder regardless of whether there's any activity.

I ended up using the Rumpus FTP Server instead of OS X Server to handle FTP uploads to my computer. So, I didn't need to test out the hidden workaround feature in Hazel.