— Adam Plouff

Project Folders – Part 2

There are a few things I do repeatedly. Once I do something enough times I usually try to find a way to automate the process. By automate I mean to find a system or tool that will do the work at the same level of quality (or better) in less time.

Project folder creation can easily be automated. After all, it’s just a set of hierarchical folders named appropriately. Some people keep a folder template called ProjectFolder on their desktop that they copy to their work drive whenever they start a new project. This totally works, and if this works for you don’t let me tell you otherwise.

I created a simple Automator script to do essentially the same thing, but it only takes one click and my naming scheme remains consistent.

Why not just view by date or name whenever you need that particular view? Because I rarely switch from column view in finder. I’ve always liked seeing the folder structure for the location of files. It helps me know where I am. I also want projects to be grouped in a certain way, so I decided on my current naming scheme.

Naming: Every week I start anywhere from 1 to 10 new projects. Each project has a Network, Start Date and Name. This is how I like to organize my RAID, because it groups projects in an easily understandable fashion.

I format my dates YYYY.MM.DD (Year, Month, Day). It makes archiving projects a lot cleaner. They sort from earliest to latest and a 4 digit year doesn’t get confused as a month.

Automator: Bundled with every mac is an underused app called Automator that can be used to do a lot of really helpful repetitive tasks. Google can tell you more if you’re interested. This script is the convoluted way of telling Automator to: Make a new folder named with today’s date and copy the contents of the template project folder into it.

The prefix Ω is the last ASCII character so it is guaranteed to be at the bottom of an alphabetical list. This puts it in the root out of the way.

The first step for making this script work is to create a folder structure that works for you. This will be your project folder template. Place it somewhere safe. I keep mine in a folder called Ω_Stock where I keep files I use all the time (network toolkits, stock footage, etc). Check out Project Folders Part 1 for more on folder structure.

Start up Automator and create a new workflow.

• Get Selected Finder Items – Selects the current folder location
• Set Value of Variable – Creates a variable for this folder to be recalled later
• New Folder – Creates a new folder named _todaysDate_ (a built-in variable that calls today’s date and can be formatted to our liking) in our originally selected location
• Set Value of Variable – Creates a new variable with the location of our newly created folder
• Get Specified Finder Items – Selects each of the subfolders that live in the project folder template. This must be customized for each system as the template location will vary.
• Copy Finder Items – Copy’s these folders and all enclosed folders/files to the newly created project folder

Variables: When variables are created they live in the panel below the workflow. They can be dragged from there to almost any field in the script. We want to modify the Today’s Date variable by right clicking on it and selecting Edit. This allows us to set a Custom Format as [1999].[01].[05].

Application Accessability: Save this workflow as an Application in the same folder as the project folder template. Now the only way for this overly involved method to actually save you time is to have it be one click away. Another little known feature of OS X’s finder is that you can drag pretty much anything into its toolbar. This creates a shortcut to the file, application or folder. To remove items hold down Opt and drag from the toolbar.

Icon: Changing from the default Automator icon is totally unnecessary, but kinda helpful to remind you what the app does. Info on changing icons can be found here. To make your own check out img2icns. Theres’s a copy of my icon in the download folder.

Usage: Navigate to whatever folder/drive you work off of, and click the application shortcut. If everything is set up correctly in the script it should create a folder named 2011.06.08 (whatever the current date is).

• Press Return to rename the folder
• Press the Up arrow to go the beginning and type the abbreviated client name
• Press the Down arrow to go to the end and type the project name

All the folder structure and any included files should have populated and your project folder is created.