Can someone please let me know how I can set things up so that everything I scan with my Fujitsu ScanSnap gets automatically tagged with a particular metadata comment of my choosing?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated… Thanks!
Unfortunately, no. You cannot run custom actions after the document has been imported. You could, however, scan with the ScanSnap not to DEVONthink but to a local folder and attach a folder action or Automator workflow to that folder that then imports the file, runs OCR on it, and adds some metadata to the Comments field.
Thanks for the tip…I have never been very good at constructing an Automator workflow that does exactly what I need it to, so I was hoping you could help me figure out how to create an Automator workflow that I can save as a Folder Action that I’ll apply to a particular folder where I will save all documents I scan with my ScanSnap scanner…
Please see the screenshot below for a visual of how I have configured the Automator workflow at this point (though I am pretty sure that something with the current configuration is bound to be wrong)…
I have the workflow setup to first open a particular database (and to show this step of the Automator workflow so that I can choose the database I’d like to import to; then it gets the folder’s contents, applies a spotlight comment of ‘ScanSnap’ and then performs OCR on the document…
Does it appear to be setup correctly?
Out of curiosity, do I have to add a step to the workflow that will somehow prevent the Folder Action from repeatedly running over and over again on a document that it’s already been executed on (because that document will still be in the original folder…i.e. should I add a step to move the document to a different folder entitled something like ‘Previously Processed Scans’), or will Automator somehow know that its already processed that particular document…
Also, When I added the OCR step, it asked if I wanted to add a copy step to the workflow because the OCR step will make permanent changes to the original file…Is this advisable?
Are all of the steps in the Folder Action workflow ordered correctly?
Any other thoughts or suggestions that anyone might have to help me perfect this workflow would be greatly appreciated…Thanks!
Looks OK to me, you could put the contents of the folder into a variable that you retrieve at the end of the current workflow to move those files to the Trash. But this is only possible on Leopard.
You may want to Set Current Group though before running the OCR that way you can determine in what group they will be deposited.
I would be extremely grateful if you wouldn’t mind filling me in on the exact steps I would have to follow to add the folder contents as a variable at the end of the workflow to move the files already processed to the trash (as I am using Leopard, and have no idea how to use variables)…
Thanks!
It’s in the Utilities library and called “Set value of variable”, there you can also find its counterpart called “Get value of variable”. Use this before and after the OCR action to set and get the list of files. Then you can use the “Move Finder items to Trash” to dispose of them.
My workflow to accomplish this task didn’t work correctly…I am sure that some of my folder action steps are screwed up somewhere in the chain of events/actions…
The obvious problem was that after the first page had been scanned (with several more pages that were queued to be scanned next in my multi-page document scan)…I promptly get a pop-up dialog from the folder action workflow asking me which database I wanted to open (as that was the first step of my folder action workflow…I actually got two of these pop-up messages asking which database I wanted to open…not just one). I got this pop-up notice even before the multipage documetn had finished being scanned…
How can I resolve this so that it doesn’t prompt me until the scan has completely?
I have things configured in the scansnap manager software to output a single pdf file using the ‘Save to file’ option in the scansnap manager settings and the chosen file path is to a folder entitled ‘Scanner Output’ (which incidentlally is also what I inserted for the variable name in my workflow below…Please have a look and let me know what I’ve done wrong, as I have absolutely no idea how to fix things from this point…
Thanks!
You should switch off any user feedback for all of these actions. (Click on Options and make sure that “Show this action when the workflow runs” is not checked.)
Also before your last step, you want to delete the “Get Folder Contents”: before that step you already have the necessary files in your variable and you don’t want to add any new ones here! Otherwise you will lose scans. And to remind you of that fact rename the variable to “Incoming scans” o.s.s. because it is not the folder.