How does Hazel determine "Kind"?

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How does Hazel determine "Kind"? Mon Sep 20, 2010 6:14 pm • by distantstorm
Hi,

I feel a bit dumb but I'm using 14 day trial at the moment and going through the basic task of having Hazel sort out my downloads folder. I currently have a rule for "Kind" being documents to put them in a folder as well as "Kind" being movies to put them in a separate folder. When I run the rules, however, some Quicktime tutorial movies I downloaded are being placed in the Documents folder instead of the movies folder. Also jpegs (which I currently have no rule for) are getting placed in the documents folder as well.
So, I'm wondering if there is any documentation that tells me what files Hazel recognizes as being Documents, Movies, Pictures, etc. and whether I'm just missing something obvious.

Thanks for any help,

Steve
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Re: How does Hazel determine "Kind"? Wed Sep 22, 2010 3:14 pm • by Mr_Noodle
"Kind" is determined by the operating system, not Hazel. But keep in mind that movies, pictures, etc are all documents as well and if you have the document rule appear first, that is the one that gets executed. Use the rule preview and rearrange the rules until it works how you want (also check the help on rules if you need to understand this more).
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Re: How does Hazel determine "Kind"? Wed Sep 22, 2010 8:11 pm • by distantstorm
I'm happy enough re-ordering my rules. That works perfectly. Can I clarify just out of interest though - does the operating system have more than one "Kind" for a given file in order that pictures and movies are also classed as Documents? I only see one value when I do a "Get Info" on a file. This is more of a curiosity into how things are working now, rather than a problem. In a similar (or perhaps identical) vein, are there different levels of "Kind" in order that, for example, Movies are grouped together even though the value for Kind in the OS can differ ("AVI Movie" and "MPEG4 movie")?

Thanks for any insight - and thanks for creating Hazel also. Really enjoying it.

Steve
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Re: How does Hazel determine "Kind"? Thu Sep 23, 2010 2:03 pm • by Mr_Noodle
The "Kind" attribute is based on a thing called UTIs (Uniform Type Identifiers). It's actually a hierarchy. Here's a link to Apple's developer documentation on it: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ ... _conc.html

If you look under the section called "Conformance", you'll see a tree of types. You don't need to memorize it (also, the types look different than what you see as "Kind"); it's just there as an example to illustrate the point.

In short, movies, images and such are documents and mpeg, avis, etc are movies. I don't think there's an actual visual tree with all of this mapped out but most of it should make some sense.
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Re: How does Hazel determine "Kind"? Mon Feb 14, 2011 2:36 pm • by ReactiveLight
I'm a new (trial) user, and match by 'Kind' doesn't seem to be working for me. I'm trying to match pictures & movies imported from my Canon G11 camera via OS X's AutoImporter. Pictures (extension: JPG, Finder type: JPEG document, MIME type: image/jpeg) aren't recognized as "Image", nor videos (extension: MOV, Finder type: Apple QuickTime container) as "Movie". Obviously, I can work around this by matching the file extension, but I'd like a more general solution and I'm curious why match by kind doesn't work.

FWIW, I'm using OS X 10.6.6
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Re: How does Hazel determine "Kind"? Fri Feb 18, 2011 4:47 pm • by Mr_Noodle
It's possible the files aren't being indexed by Spotlight. When you select the file in Finder and do "Get Info", what is the Kind listed there? Also, do you see any information under "More Info"?
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