Automator workflow of the month: Automatically file downloaded items
Like all good Automator workflows, this one is hatched from something I find to be an annoyance. I download a lot of files—disk images, songs, pictures, and books. All of them go into the Downloads folder within my user folder. After downloading them I don’t always retrieve these files, but rather let them molder away for days or weeks. When I finally get around to using them, I rummage around in this folder, which now contains hundreds of files. Wouldn’t it be easier if all the disk-image files were in one place, pictures in another, and so on? With Automator you can make that so. Here’s how.
Create the workflow
In the Finder, create two folders on the Desktop. Name the first Disk Images and the second My Pictures.
Launch Automator (in your /Applications folder) and in the workflow template that appears choose Folder Action and click Choose. In the resulting window, click the Folder Action receives files and folders added to pop-up menu, select Other, and navigate to the Downloads folder inside your user folder. Click Choose. Select the Files & Folders library and drag these actions, in order, into the workflow area: Filter Finder Items, Move Finder Items, Get Specified Finder Items, Get Folder Contents, Filter Finder Items, and Move Finder Items.
In the first action (the first instance of the Filter Finder Items action), leave the first pop-up set to All. Then, configure the next row of pop-up menus to read File Extension is dmg.
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