I have a seemingly niche request that happens more often than you'd imagine. I think we may have tackled it previously in some form or other but, of course, I can't figure out what the (I think) related action was designed to do just by looking at it. (I can send it to you, but I'm not sure how I'd create a file I could attach to an email. Export started asking me lots of scary questions, so I cancelled it.)

Here's the problem...

I have a box set & each CD is in a numbered folder.

I have a similarly numbered cover image for each CD but all the cover images are (as so often happens) in a separate folder.

Rather than move or copy them manually, I wonder if an action is possible to automate the process.

To start with, it's worth mentioning that I have an action that will load a file with "cover" in the name from the folder where the tracks are & I can run that with an entire box set selected, so that doesn't necessarily need to be part of this action.

What I think I basically need to do is to load a box set into Yate, select it all, run the action, whereupon it will ask me to point it to the folder that contains all the cover images. It will then either move or copy each image to the folder with the corresponding number.

The relationship between the respective folder locations will not always be the same & neither will the names of the folders concerned so I suspect that, to keep the action usable for other similar situations, the folder locations will be ascertained by the files loaded into Yate & the folder of source images will be ascertained by me telling the action where to find them.

Of course, you often have a better idea!

The screenshot below shows the target folders on the left & the source folder on the right (in the current scenario).

The action I already have that might relate is called: "Move Image Files Based On Names" & in the notes it says:

"Supplied a folder which can contain image files which end with _#. # can be any sequence of decimal digits.

The action will display a panel for each successful move which can be disabled. If you want to reenable the display of moved files, hold down the Option key when starting the action."

If you think this might already be what I'm after, it could be an easy win!

If you need me to send you the action so you could look at it in detail, I can do that, but you'll need to tell me how. 🙂

It was faster to write a new action. It was written in v6.14 which was released today so you'll have to update.

Download https://2manyrobots.com/actions/Move-Numbered-Artwork-to-Numbered-Folders.zip

The action is named: Move Numbered Artwork to Numbered Folders

You do not have to load any files. You'll be prompted for the folder containing the artwork and the folder containing the destination folders.

As of now the action copies the images and does not embed them in the audio files. If you want this changed let me know.

Sorry about that ... I missed that the folders could be deep.

Download https://2manyrobots.com/actions/Move-Numbered-Artwork-to-Numbered-Folders-(Recursive).zip

The action is now called: Move Numbered Artwork to Numbered Folders (Recursive)

The new action recursively walks the folders ... even though Yate does not really support recursion. :). It does assume that folder_### folders do not contain others.