Finder Catalog Local

Applescript clone and local implementation of Finder Catalog Numbers by Tyler Hall.

I really like the setup Tyler Hall created and documented for Finder Catalog Numbers, but wanted to make this a local implementation. I don't need to have multiple device support, just my laptop since that's my primary productivity device. I also wanted to have tags support since I share a lot of files with coworkers and I didn't want to confuse them with index numbers in the filenames.

Setup

• Create a counter folder under ~/Documents
• Inside this folder create counter.txt with a single line of your starting index number (i.e. 100000) - or place these somewhere else on your system and update the scripts accordingly
• Update the pre variable in the scripts to your preferred prefix
• Tag to write tags to files and to power the clog search since there's no URI helper app here
• TextExpander to replicate the .cat and .ncat functions (optional) - see note below
• File Tags: searching enabled in Alfred File Search to remove friction from indexed file searching (optional)
• FastScripts for easy access to the scripts (optional)

Note:

Setup for TextExpander is fairly easy; just copy the contents of the te_read_counter and te_write_counter scripts to new Applescript expansions in TextExpander with the abbreviations .cat and .ncat respectively.