autocuration with Hazel

Hazel is a Mac app that watches folders and does things when something happens inside them.

You can base your Hazel rules on "file added to folder," file name, file creation or modification date, tags, labels, etc.

Rules can trigger actions, and there are many, many actions to choose from: Rename the file, run scripts, apply labels, upload to a server, copy/move to another folder, make a notification, import to Music or Photos, etc. etc.

One rule I use understands that purple labels are for a particular topic I'm keeping track of, and it moves anything with a purple label off into a specific folder.

When I'm getting images ready to share, I run an export in Lightroom that deposits the exported image into a specific folder. I've got a Hazel rule watching that folder, and it imports anything that lands in there into Photos. That's about it. The image is still in that folder so that I can drag it into Ivory or Scribbles or whatever, but now it's in Photos.

I like the workflow because I don't actually like doing anything in Photos. I don't like editing in it, I don't like sharing to other services from it. But it has the advantage of being ubiquitous across my devices, and now it has the advantage of being a running record of  things I felt like sharing from Lightroom, my primary organizer and editor, the way I wanted them to look at that moment.

I'm happy with it, because it creates a record of what I was thinking about picture-taking, and what my taste was, at that point of export. I've been doing this for about a month now, and my recent Photos stuff  is now a relatively calm "display only" look at what I've taken (plus a scattering of receipts, pictures of my parking spots, and memes, and I sort of like that, too.)

I think I will probably move that workflow from Photos to SmugMug at some point, or add a SmugMug step to the existing workflow, once I understand how I want to organize things there. I guess I trust Apple less than I trust SmugMug, and it points to an eventual way out of Lightroom if I've at least got the digital equivalent of acid-free archival quality prints elsewhere.

Either way, it's a piece of the ephemerality puzzle I've been thinking about.