4.2 Custom Folder Search

Okay, let's build a workflow together.

Now, if you look at the little plus sign down here, you've got a bunch of options.

In the gallery, you learn about workflows.

And getting started, you get little text files that give you the details, like what are the parameters of a clipboard in workflows.

But I want to make something.

So let's just go straight down to the templates.

And under templates, we're going to go to files and apps.

And we're going to look for a file filter from a keyword.

So what I want to build here is a workflow that searches a specific folder for a group of folders.

The context of this was back when I was a lawyer, I had this client folder full of all these clients, and I just wanted to get to those without having to have any other search results show up.

So I built this workflow, and subsequently I've built a bunch more like it that's searching specific folder for any folder.

And it makes a lot of sense once we see it.

So let's just do that.

We're going to call it Client Folder Search.

The reason we want to search for folders only is we don't want all the specific client documents show up.

We just want to navigate quickly to the folder.

And we'll go ahead and make this a tool.

And Create.

All right, so we've set this up.

Let's go ahead and work with it just a bit more.

I'll double click on this.

And the first thing we need to do is type in, what is the keyword you type in to trigger this?

I'm going to make it client.

And then underneath it'll say what it's doing, it's searching the client folder.

I'm gonna say only returns folders, not files.

Again, this will make sense once I run it.

This is really useful.

So the thing we wanna do then is search a specific folder and we only wanna return folders.

So first let's pick the specific folder.

Hit the little plus button here and I go to my documents.

You can see I've got a folder there called clients.

That's the folder we're searching.

So when I trigger this, it will only look for any folders inside this folder.

Great.

Now, we don't want it to return file names, we want it to only return folders.

The way you do that is by give it a file type, and you do that on this basic setup page.

The easiest way I found is just to drag the file type you want in.

If you wanted to just search PDFs, you drag in a PDF, but we want to just search folders.

So we're going to just pull in a folder.

In fact, let's just go get the actual client folder.

It doesn't have to be the actual client folder.

Could be any folder, but I kind of like the way that works.

All right, so now I'm going to save that just because we're that far along.

We're going to look for folders inside the client folder.

That's everything we want.

Now what I'd like to do is make it a little fancy.

We're going to add a icon to it.

And you can do that with just any icon file.

One quick way to do that is just a Google image search.

I'm going to say folder icon PNG transparent.

I find adding PNG and transparent often gets you there really quickly.

There's one right there.

We'll use that.

So I'm going to drag that over the side.

Then I'm going to pull it off the web and put it there.

And now I've got a nice little folder.

We can also, by the way, put a folder on the actual workflow.

So let me just minimize this.

We're going to save this.

And you can see there it says Client Folder Search.

It's just got those little boxes.

That's kind of boring.

Let's hit Edit Details.

And you can see there's another option for an icon there.

So let me go back to that folder.

We actually need one with a background for this.

We don't want transparent because of the way it renders.

All right.

So I will move it over, drag it in.

There we go.

And save that.

OK, so you can see it's got a nice little icon attached to it.

I've made it-- spent enough time making it pretty.

Let's see how this thing works.

I'll activate Alfred, type client.

There it is.

I'll hit the Tab key.

You can also use Return.

And then I'll start typing in a client name.

I know I have a client name option command.

There they are.

And if I just hit the Return key, it shows up in the Finder window.

This saved me so much time as a lawyer because you don't get any noise in Alfred.

You just get directly to the folders that you need.

I use it now with my field guides and like a lot of the stuff I do that has stacks of folder attached to it, I just create a quick Alfred workflow for those.

Another thing you can do with that, by the way, in addition to navigating to it, you can also just hit the Command + Down Arrow.

We've covered that before.

and you can start navigating it.

Or hit Command-Up-Arrow to go back another level, and you can see there's the other client files.

This is a super useful workflow.

It's not hard to create.

Once again, the pieces you need to remember is you set the file type to folder and the scope to whatever the folder is you want to search, and off you go.

And frankly, once you make it once, it's really easy to just go down and duplicate it, and then just give it a new name and change the scope.

put it to whatever other folder you want to search, and you're good to go.