Automatically adding Screenshots to Yoink with Hazel (Improved)

Note: This is an improved version of my original solution to this problem.

As a reminder, the problem to be solved is to have screenshots automatically appear in Yoink as they are taken. Again, as a reminder, on macOS, screenshots are saved to the desktop as files with names of the form Screen Shot YYYY-MM-DD at HH.MM.SS.png, e.g. Screen Shot 2017-11-22 at 22.30.10.png. And one final reminder — Hazel is an app that watches the filesystem for events, and executes actions in response. Hazel rules are added to folders.

My original solution was to add a Hazel rule to the desktop folder with the condition Name starts with Screen Shot and a single Shell script action which used the open terminal command to send the screenshot to Yoink. The good people at Hazel replied to my tweet about the original post with a suggestion: I think you can do the same thing without a script. Try using the “Open” action.

Unsurprisingly, the Hazel suggestion proved to be spot on.

So, based on the suggestion from Hazel I updated the action in my Screen Shots rule on the desktop folder to the following: Open with application Yoink:

As you can see, the resulting Hazel rule is now impressively simple — one condition, and one action.

You can download an export of the Hazel rule here (it needs to be applied to the desktop folder to work).