 If you want to be more organized and productive on your Mac, then you may be interested in a little app called Hazel, and I'm going to tell you all about it in this video. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec, and we're back onto Mac productivity today, and I'm talking about an app called Hazel, which is basically used to organize the files and folders on your Mac, so you can set up different rules and have it basically watch different folders and then perform actions on the files and folders that are contained within that folder, depending on basically the rules that you set it. And this is one of basically my sort of core five productivity apps that I install on any new Mac. So there would be this one, then the others would be keyboard maestro for my automations and keyboard shortcuts and things like that. Then text expander for expanding out text snippets to much longer things, so you can basically generate your email address with a couple of keystrokes or even whole reams of text and responses and things like that with just the touch of a couple of keys. So that is another one, text expander. Next would be one password. So that is my password manager of choice. Other password managers are available. Certainly it is a step up from sticky notes on your monitor. With something like one password, there is no excuse for having a insecure password, basically, because you just have one single point of entry into one password with a secure password. But then you can store all of your other secure passwords for all of your other websites and access points and things like that within there and it then remembers those for you. You can also store credit card details, things like that, so that you don't have to remember those and carry them around with you if you need to buy things online or whatever. So I'll do another video all about these other applications and the final one of the five, by the way, would be Dropbox. So again, other syncing services are available, but I've been using Dropbox since almost since its inception and it's been pretty flawless for me really. And I use that for all of my syncing and some of my backup needs and things like that. So those are the sort of five apps that I put onto any new Mac as a starting point and they form the core of my sort of automation and productivity. Obviously, there's also Apple Scripts and Automated, but those are Apple products that are on every Mac that you get anyway. So I will do a video all about how I sort of link all of these things together and do a bit more sort of in-depth tutorial on how to use these, but today we're gonna give the introduction to Hazel just to show you a little bit about what it can do. I'm not really gonna scratch the surface, to be honest, because I could spend days talking about Hazel and all the little tricks that you can do with it, but for now we'll just stick with some basics to give you an idea of what it is and how you may be able to use it on your Mac. So if I come over to my screen sharing, I'll show you the website. It is from a company called NoodleSoft and it's noodlesoft.com. I'll obviously leave the link in the description. And basically it is a really straightforward website, straightforward app. You can buy it or you can download the free trial. If you want to buy it, it is $42 and there is pricing available for a family pack, I believe for up to five users. So it's $42 or 65 for the family license. And if you do already have Hazel and you've got a previous version, it's $20 for the upgrade. So it does really, I mean, it is a great way to organize your folders and how you manage your things on your Mac. But also as it says on here, it really is more than just filing. So it definitely is and we'll see that hopefully in a minute. So if I come over to the app interface, this is basically what the app looks like. Now, when you install it, by the way, I should just point out this is basically going to be controlling things that are on your Mac. It's going to be watching folders and it's going to be performing actions on those files and folders based on criteria that you give it. And so it obviously is going to need access to your Mac's disk for read and write access and things like that. So when you install it, it will say to you, go ahead and grant permission in the system preferences in the privacy and sharing section. And it will prompt you how to do this and even just take you directly to it. But just to be aware that when you are installing it, it will ask for this access. And so that's why. And so you do need to go ahead and grant it that access. But once you have done that, it basically sits up in the menu bar. It doesn't need to be running as such to work. It is one of these ones that is embedded in the system once you've set things up. So you don't need to worry about having the app open all the time. Once you've set the rules up, it will just work. So let's come over to the interface. And basically what we've got is a nice clean install because I'm just in the process of setting up this new Mac Mini at the moment. So I thought this was a great time to actually demo this before it gets cluttered with all of my different rules that might just overly complicate things. So basically what we've got is down this side, we've got the list of all of the folders that are currently being watched. And at the moment, we've just got the downloads folder which is empty actually. And then we've also got the Ecamm Live recordings folder. So incidentally for that, with these videos, I'm recording using Ecamm Live. And so it records them to a location. Now previously on my MacBook, I had it just recording to the hard drive and that is where the recordings would stay. But with the new MacBook, sorry, the new Mac Mini, I got one with a smaller hard drive and then bought a much larger external hard drive to store all of my files and folders and things like that. But because I wanted to have the maximum possible read write speed for any videos that were gonna be saved from Ecamm Live, I have those saved to my local drive. But then I have Hazel basically after a couple of days, it takes them and archives them over to my main external drive. So that is just sort of one use case already, right off the bat, that it's basically sorting out these files that are being saved from Ecamm Live and just automatically moving them out there after I've done the recording basically. So next, if we come to the downloads folder, this is the first one we're gonna look at and we're gonna set up a couple of rules because there are a couple of use cases for this. And incidentally, this is the folders that we're looking at, but then there's also this column here, which is where we're gonna define some rules. And then this whole panel on this side is where we're gonna actually specify exactly what to do, what to look for and what to do with the files if any conditions are met. But it should all become self-explanatory shortly. So we come up to here and we're gonna click on this little button to add a new rule. So we've created a new rule now. So here we go, it's called new rule. And basically what I'm gonna do here is one of the tasks that I do or one of the sort of workflows that I have is I use Adobe Stock to look for stock images and things like that. And so those are automatically downloaded. I go to Safari, go to Adobe Stock and then if I download some sort of stock image or something like that, it will go into my downloads folder. Well, I don't really want it to stay in my downloads folder. I want it to be stored in my Adobe Stock archive basically so that I always know where to go to look for any images that I've previously downloaded. So I'm gonna call this rule here. What you can see is we've got a place where we can define the name. So I'm gonna just call this one Adobe Stock so that I know what it is and then click tab. And then the next one is basically we're gonna set some conditions. So we've got this first part here where we can set a condition to look for if something is met. And then we've got here and it says do the following if we've got a match. So the condition that I'm looking for here is I want to look for any file that has been downloaded from the Adobe Stock website. So you can do lots of searches. So the condition is we can have multiple conditions by the way. So I could look for anything that was downloaded from Adobe Stock in the last couple of days or older than a couple of days. In fact, that might be an idea. Maybe I want to leave it in the downloads for the day that I download it, but then have it moved out of there say a day later or two days later. In fact, I'll use that as an example because it will make it easier to see how you can sort of stack these different actions up. So we want basically if all of the following conditions are met. So we're gonna set the conditions that we want it to have been downloaded from Adobe Stock and we want it to have been in the downloads folder for more than two days basically. So here the condition, the first one, we can see this dropdown. The conditions we've got is we could look by name, the extension. So that's the type of file, the full name of it, the date added, date creative, date modified and all sorts. There's lots of different conditions that we can use here. But there's also this one, source URL. So I'm gonna click that one first and then here the source URL is. So if we know the exact URL that it's coming from, we can put that one as it is there saying is. But I'm not sure exactly if sometimes it might come from a slightly different source or they might have a different extension or something like that. So I'm just going to look for a URL that contains. Now I do happen to know that the main domain is basically it's stock.adobe.com slash and then there may be some other extensions. So I'm just gonna put that the domain, the URL needs to contain stock. If I can spell it right. Stock.adobe. So that now is basically one of the conditions. We're looking for a file, any file that has come from a source URL which contains stock.adobe. Now we're gonna add this other condition. So I'm gonna click on this little plus icon. So now you can see it's just popped in another box and now we're gonna look for basically the file must have been in the downloads for more than two days. So I'm gonna come to here and I'm gonna go down to date added. So this is the date that it was added to this folder and then you can see is, you can, we've got all these different options is a specific date or is not or is before a certain date. In the last, you can see all of these different conditions that we've got. So basically I need to look for one that is not in the last day, I suppose. Let me have a quick look. If there's an easier way to express that or is after would be probably the way to do it. Is after I'm just looking for the best way to express this now is not in the last, there we go, is not in the last one day. So I could change that to not in the last one day. That's the way to do it. So there we go. You sometimes just have to think about the logic of this thing. So we're looking for a file that is from a URL that contains stock.adobe and also the date added to the folder is not in the last one day. So there we go. That is anything that is in the downloads folder that's been there for longer than a day is going to meet these conditions. So now what do we want to do to it? So we do want to move it. There are other things that you can do with it though but we want to move it to another folder. But actually I think I might like to rename these as well because sometimes with Adobe stock you've got a whole load of images. I'm not sure exactly how many I've downloaded so far and they are sorted by alphabetically. They've got some sort of naming convention but actually I think I would prefer to have them in my folder with my little date timestump at the beginning because then when I go into the folder and sort them by date or rather sort the names then they will have the little date stump at the beginning and so that will sort them better for me. So what I'm gonna do is I want to, before I move them, I'm actually going to rename them. So I'm going to click on this rename and then the pattern. So we've got the pattern name is basically the actual name of the file as it is but what I want to do in here is I also, if I click in this box, I want to add the date. So I'm gonna add date added like this. Now what you can see is for each of these things there is also a little drop down arrow next to them so you can alter the formatting. So I'm gonna click in date added and put a little drop down and then I'm going to edit the date pattern. And now the way I always have my dates is basically year first then month and then day because then when you sort them they will always come in the correct order whereas if you have the date first then it will sort by that, if you have the sort of the day number first then if you're sorting by those you'll be all out of order. So I have it sorted by the year and in fact I'll move the little hyphen like this. So it's basically just going to be four digits for the year, two digits for the month and two digits for the year, the day. So that is the format that I want and then I want a little space and a hyphen like that and then click done. And so that now is basically going to add the dates stamp then the name and then it's got the extension on it. So as you can see there's an example down here so it will be the date in this format followed by a hyphen and followed by the name of the file and the extension. So that is what I want the files to be named as and now we're going to actually move these to our archive so I'm going to click on plus and I'm going to move them to a folder and here you can select the folder, either an existing folder that's in here but more than likely you'll want to click on other to actually specify a specific folder and then this is brought up a panel up here. Oops a daisy, it's just off screen. There we go. And I've put it as a shortcut here just to make it easier for this demonstration. I want to move this to my Adobe stock folder. So now I'll click on that one open and that's it. We've set up a rule. So now I can click save and you can see that it's saved all of this and it's also renamed it there. So now basically this is going to be working forever now until we decide to stop it. So you can always go up to pause and pause the rule for that particular folder. If you want to pause them for all of the rules that is you would click pause. If you want to just toggle a specific rule on and off you can click this one here. So that is now just going to work and forever I will always know where to find my Adobe stock footage or files and things like that. So they'll be constantly filed and automatically renamed for me. So just to give you another little example of this because I can tell you another use case which comes in quite handy is also I download music from Epidemic Sound to use in my YouTube channel and other productions and things like that. So what I want to do is if I come over to the downloads because again that is where it will be saved we're going to do something quite similar but there's another little thing that I want to show you in here as well. So I'm going to click on the little plus icon. We're going to add a new one and I'm going to call that one Epidemic. I'm not very good at spelling today. I think it's speaking and spelling at the same time I'm not good at. There we go. So Epidemic I'll just call it that. We're going to do something quite similar and I'm going to say if the again we're looking for the URL. So if the source URL or address is or contains and let me just get the URL for Epidemic. This one will always come from epidemic.com I think. So I'm just going to drop that in there like that. So if the URL, the source URL is Epidemic Sound then what we want to do and I'm not going to do anything about the date on this one actually because usually if I'm going to be using this music then I'll need to actually have it in my sort of assets folder for whatever I'm using it for. So I'm just going to basically look for any time any music is downloaded to the downloads. It's just going to move it straight into my Epidemic Sound folder. So what we're going to do is but there's one little thing that I'm going to do first. I am going to do this little renaming thing but what I'm going to do here is for the pattern after the name of the track what I actually want to do is I want to add in the duration of the track in seconds because if you're using music in Ecamm Live and say you want to use it for this is a bit niche and maybe not for a lot of people who are using Hazel but it's one of my use cases if you are using a piece of music in Ecamm Live and you want to set a countdown timer for example to exactly match the length of the music if you're doing a live stream and you want this to be the intro music it's really handy if you actually just know the length of the track that you're going to set the countdown timer to. Now you could obviously go in and find this out yourself and then you could add that into the name or add it into Ecamm Live or something like that but it's much better if you've just got it as part of the name to begin with and it's all done automatically because it just saves you the bother doesn't it and that's what Hazel's all about it's about these little time saving things that are going to save you the hassle of having to do it yourself. So what we want to do here is we want to add in the length of the track. Now I'm sure it's in there we may have to just look around for what the exact terminology to use it so that's one of the things with this is you do need to sometimes just think a little bit about how to phrase things. So we have got all of these things the date modified and all of this but you've also got this other one here saying other and basically this can get lots of different parameters. Now you can have all sorts if you've got like a photograph for example you've got a lot of embedded data in there like the focal length and things like that of the camera settings and all of those sorts of metadata that's embedded you can basically search for any of that and include any of that into the file. So if you also want to source your photographs and wants to have that sort of information in your file names then you can certainly do that with this as well. But we want to look for the, I suppose duration let me have a look if it's duration. I did duration, I've surprised myself I didn't know if it would be duration or length to be honest but I suppose duration is the correct term isn't it after all. So we want to click the duration I've surprised myself there to be honest I thought that was going to go horribly wrong and I'd be searching for it for ages. So that is the duration in time duration of this item in seconds is what it says there. So if I click done this is now basically going to form the part of the file name essentially. So I'm just going to just leave a little hyphen in here and then I might even add in seconds like that just so that we're absolutely clear of what the duration is. And as you can see it does give you a little preview of what the format's going to be. So it says item one, one second. Now I may actually also add the date added in here for exactly the same reason as we did with the Adobe stock just so that I can know exactly which is the newest one I suppose. So what I'm going to do is just add that in and I'm going to add in the date added and I'm also going to go and basically come in here and edit the date pattern and I'll show you something that I should have done but forgot to do in the last one. So if I come here take out these hyphens and then put it like that, so click done. So that's now I've defined my date pattern. By the way, you have got these other things so you've got the day of the week you could have it written as a actual day Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday or whatever you can also go down to the minutes and seconds, milliseconds if you want or AM and PM or the quarter, things like that. Some of these are very useful if you're doing like company documents or fiscal documents and things like that and you do want to know what quarter was it this document in. I use this with things like bank statements and accounting and things like that. So when it downloads it, it will just file these things in the correct folder with the correct naming convention and things like that. You can see how some of these things can be used in other use cases as well. But for my date format, I always use this sort of almost like reverse date format. So I'm going to click done and then what I should have done before is on this date added now that I've created this custom one, I'm going to come and click set default. So there we go, that is now the default and that says enter the default value to use if the field is blank. Well, I'm just going to leave it blank because if it is blank, then I don't want it to put anything. So now I'm going to click done on that. So we've now basically renamed our file with the date, the name and the duration. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually move these to the correct location. So I'm going to move those to this one, another folder and this one needs to be in my second, there we go, ecam live and the audio. So this is where it's going to basically save all of my music and audio tracks. So there we go, we've got two rules in there and that's basically taking my any, oh, what's it Daisy, I nearly forgot to save that. There we go, so that is now saved. So we've got two rules there that are set up for the downloads folder and those are basically just going to be working in the background to keep all of my files and folders neatly tidied away. I will just show you another one here because another one that people have is screenshots. If they have them going to their desktop, I use my desktop very much like an actual desktop. So it sometimes becomes cluttered during the day but then I clear everything away and clear it all away at the end of the day but I use it just to sort of throw things on and doing stuff where I need to take screenshots and things like that, I have them just go in there as well. Now often I do use screenshots and I'll maybe rename them or use them in a file or something like that but sometimes they just get left on the desktop and I do actually want to just sort of file them away because I might want to go to them at some point later on but then I don't necessarily want to keep them forever because if I haven't used it after a week or so then it's probably likely that I'm never gonna use it but I just don't want them sitting around on my desktop. So let's create a little rule for that as well and I'll show you how basically you can add in another folder. So here we're watching the downloads folder but we can just come up here and click another folder here. So if I click on that one and we can choose which folder we want. So if I come to my desktop, which is, where's my desktop on? All right, it's down here. So if I click on this one now, so now we're watching the, we've got the desktop in here as well and we've got this empty place to add some new rules specific for the desktop. So I'm gonna add a new rule which is called screenshots. Sorry, I don't need to press return until I've put in some things. I wondered what was going on there. So I've typed in the name, I don't need to press enter until we've actually added in the rule. So basically if the name contains and then all screenshots do contain the word screenshot and then they've got a date stump. So if the name contains screenshot, it's this simple and we want them, if they've been there for longer than, so the date added is longer than today basically. So what was that is not in the last one day. Then we want to move them and we want to move them to a folder called screenshots. I have got that in here somewhere, one second. So I've put this in here just to be quick about it. So that is gonna basically move those to a folder called screenshots and that's actually on my Dropbox as well. So I'm gonna move them to there and click on save. So that is basically any time there is a screenshot on my desktop that's been there for longer than a day, it's just gonna file it away in screenshots in my Dropbox. But as I said, I don't wanna keep them forever. I actually want to do another level of sorting. So I'm gonna click on the folder to add a new folder and I'm gonna select this screenshots folder and now I'm gonna add a rule in here, which says basically delete old screenshots. And this is basically if the date added is not in the last, let's give it two weeks, shall we? If I haven't used it within two weeks, I'm not interested in it. So if the date added is not in, that should say, is not in the last two weeks, then what we want to do is we want to basically move the folder to, move it to rather the trash. And I've spelled that wrong overnight, there we go. I told you my spelling was terrible today. So there you can see we've got basically two different folders that we're looking. We're looking at the desktop and if it sees a screenshot on the desktop that has been there for longer than a day, it moves it in archives, it temporarily in my screenshots folder on Dropbox. And if then it's been in that folder for more than two weeks, it just deletes it because I obviously don't need it if it's been sitting there that long and I haven't taken it, renamed it, used it or whatever. So that is just a little bit of an insight into some of the things that you can do with Hazel. And I hope you can see with some of those rules that you've got, you can really get into some really fine detail actually and you can have it do a lot of your sort of automation of filing, filing of bank statements. You can also have it look for in the same way that we specified a URL. You can also have it look for the person who sent it. So I set up ones for this where basically it watches my email attachments folder and it can automatically file files that have come as attachments from specific people into specific files and folders and things like that. As I say, I will be doing some more videos all about Hazel because it's a lot to take in for just one video and we could literally be here for hours looking at all the different ways that I'm using it. So I figured I'll just do a quick introduction and then a little bit later I'll do a more in-depth one of some of the more advanced things that you can do with it. I hope you've found Hazel useful. If, oh, this video useful, you're not using Hazel yet. Are you? If you are using Hazel, then let me know in the comments and let me know how you're using it and while you're down there, then obviously don't forget to like and subscribe. I'll probably make a playlist all about Mac productivity actually and think about a way to structure that so that it's in a bit more of an organized way. So once I do, I'll leave the link to that playlist over here, but for now I will leave a link to my other app reviews and things like that. Until the next video, have a great day.