I've just discovered a really cool thing you can do with the Mac Finder and A Better Finder Rename. As I blogged earlier, I've been refining my photo workflow. Today, I confused myself. I haven't worked on images in over a week (because of CNU 18) and when I started working on last week's images, I found that my master folder had these two "instruction folders" (named with instructions telling me what to do next):
-3 Set Classes
-4 Set Color, Rate, Tag, & Process (empty)
Problem is, when you set the classes in Photo Mechanic, it indicates the class by tagging each image file with a color. So why did I have "Set Color" as the first item of Instruction Folder 4? It took me awhile to remember, but here's the answer: Photo Mechanic can't change the Finder's Label color, nor can it even see it. And the Finder can't see or change Photo Mechanic's Class (color.) So the only way to get the Finder's Label color to match Photo Mechanic's Class color is to move the images into folders for their PhotoMechanic Class color, then change their Finder Label color to match. Sounds complicated, but it just takes a second. Thereafter, whether you're looking at the image in the Finder or PhotoMechanic, you're seeing the same color. What I needed to do was to modify the -4 folder name from:
-4 Set Color, Rate, Tag, & Process (empty)
to
-4 Set Finder Color, Rate, Tag, & Process (empty)
But now, I've got a problem. I spent a lot of time copying the folders within my master folder to a bunch of different image folder... would I have to change them one at a time? A Better Finder Rename does a great job of changing file names if the files are all in one place. I did a search in the Finder for folders named -4 Set Color, Rate, Tag, & Process (empty). It came up with over 160 different folders, all in different locations. On a whim, I selected them all and drug them into the A Better Finder Rename window, set the old name and new name, and hit the Perform Renames button... and it worked! It changed the names of all of them at once, even though they were in different locations on my disk! Here's hoping this is useful to someone else.
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