Hi there-
I’ve been poking around Retrobatch, and it looks pretty cool. I’m currently using a lot of custom Photoshop scripts in conjunction with an app called Hazel for my image automation. www.noodlesoft.com
Hazel has a great ability to create variables (or what it calls tokens) from matched patterns in a file name. It can then pass those tokens to other rules, or to Applescripts.
It would be great if Retrobatch had a similar feature allowing the user to define a variable for later use in file naming or sorting or to perform other tasks further down the node graph. The current Sort>Rules>Filename>Matches doesn’t seem to provide an ability to create or use these tokens, and the documentation doesn’t really explain what “matches” is doing, or the input it is looking for.
From the documentation:
File Name: Option for separating images based on whether the file name contains, matches, is like, begins with, ends with, is, is not…compared to the manually entered text.
This could also save the user from needing to explicitly define what Retrobatch should do in each case. For example: if my files are named with a pattern Image_Counter_Angle.jpg And I want Retrobatch to always save files to a folder based off the angle identifier, but that angle id has 12 possibilities I would not need to create 12 different rules for each case, but with the reuse of tokens I would only need to create one rule that can create a destination folder based off of the angle ID token.
This is getting a bit verbose, but I hope you get the idea. I’m really excited to see how Retrobatch takes shape, and glad someone recognizes a need for tools like this.
