Hazel is like a housekeeper for your Mac, and it's time to put her to work.

What You Need:

>> Hazel ($21.95, noodlesoft.com/hazel, free 14-day trial)
>> A Mac running Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) or later

If your Downloads folder is so stuffed with disk images, random MP3s, and PDF bank statements that you’re starting to get afraid to look in there, you need Hazel. If your Desktop is cluttered with so many icons that it takes more than 30 seconds to find one, you need Hazel. This über-useful System Preference pane lets you create rules to keep specific folders automatically organized and maintained, so it’s perfect for those problems. But Hazel doesn’t just move your files around--it can rename them, run scripts on them, and so much more.

We’re just scratching the surface of what Hazel can do here and already see a sequel to this how-to on the horizon. So if you’ve devised a brilliant use for Hazel, send an email to susie@maclife.com, and we’ll tell the world about it.

1. Take Out the Trash

Keep the amount of trashed files under control.

After you install Hazel, open it up--it lives in System Preferences. Click to the Trash tab, and you can set rules for how large your trash will get and how long items will languish in there before being deleted. Before we told Hazel to keep our trash under 5GB and delete all trashed files after 1 week, we had about 11GB of files just sitting in there. Hazel brought back that wasted disk space.

2. App Sweep

When we undeleted iConquer, Hazel offered to restore all its supporting files too.

Also under the Trash tab, enable App Sweep. This built-in feature mimics standalone applications like AppCleaner (free, freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/) and AppZapper ($12.95, appzapper.com). When App Sweep is enabled, and you delete an item from your Applications folder, Hazel automatically searches for related items such as caches, preference files, and support files, and pops up a window asking if you want those deleted as well. Even better: If you drag the deleted application from the Trash back to the Applications folder, Hazel asks if you want the related files restored, and puts them back in their original locations, good as new.

3. Sort Downloads

No more manually dragging MP3 files into our iTunes library.

One of the most obvious uses for Hazel is to watch your Downloads folder and color or sort new items based on type or how long they’ve been in there. Under the Folders tab, click the plus sign to add a new folder, and select your Downloads folder. Then click the plus sign under Rules, and set the conditions to Kind Is Music (or Movies, or Disk Image, or PDF). Then set an action to be carried out when files in Downloads match those conditions. We’re having all downloaded MP3s automatically installed in our iTunes library, then deleted from Downloads. Click OK to add the rule to your list, and check the box next to it to have Hazel carry it out.

4. Organize Screenshots

New screenshots will be renamed with date-and-time stamps and saved to a New Screenshots folder.

Snow Leopard is great at time-stamping your screenshots, but Leopard and Tiger save screenshots right to your Desktop as Picture 1, Picture 2, and so on--those files can accumulate quickly. Hazel can watch your Desktop for new PNG files whose names begin with Picture, then rename those with a time stamp, and move them to the location of your choice. The default date stamp is just the day, but you can click Date Created in the rename pattern for more options.

5. Run a Script

This rule watches for really large photos and runs an Automator workflow to resize them as 600-pixel JPGs.

Hazel can do more than just delete, rename, and move files--it can even run a script on them. This works like Automator’s Folder Actions feature, which runs a script on any item you put in a particular folder, but with Hazel, you can add conditions. For example, using a Folder Action to resize images will resize any image in that folder, but you can tell Hazel to only run the resizing script on images of a certain file type. Hazel can run Automator workflows, shell scripts, and AppleScripts.

6. Archive a Project

No more manually archiving finished projects yourself.

Create a folder called Archive This, and add it to your Finder window’s sidebar. Set up a rule in Hazel that when a folder is put in the Archive This folder, Hazel should compress the folder into an archive, append its name with the date it was archived, and then move it to your external hard drive or other backup location. Now when you complete a project, drop its entire folder of files onto that Archive This “droplet” in your sidebar, and it’ll be whisked away to archive land.

7. Highlight Unused Apps

I excluded Adobe apps since I’m not allowed to delete them from my machine anyway.

Hazel doesn’t have to get all hands-on with your files--you can have it take a lighter touch by adding color labels to your files to give you a visual reminder to process them manually. For example, have Hazel watch your Applications folder and color red any app that hasn’t been opened in a year. (Don’t move them to a Neglected Apps folder, though, because some Applications act wonky if you try to run them outside the Applications folder.) When you see red-highlighted applications in that folder, you can decide whether to keep or delete them.