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Auto-Detect Mounted Volumes
Helping set up for the AUPN launch party this weekend, I needed to load files onto 100 USB flash drives for the obligatory swag bag. To churn through it efficiently, we had an Automator workflow copy the files onto the drives. All I had to do was insert a drive, double-click the workflow app, wait until it copied the files and unmounted the drive, then unplug the drive.
After doing this a few times, it seemed silly having to manually run the workflow; I wanted it to run automatically when a drive was plugged in. Fortunately, the solution came to me in a flash (pun absolutely intended).
It occurred to me that a folder action should detect not only files, but also devices. When you mount a drive, what folder does it appear in? Your instinct may say “the Desktop,” but this is a Finder illusion. In fact, mounted drives appear in the invisible root-level directory /Volumes/.
Thus, I saved the workflow as a folder action plug-in for /Volumes/, and it worked perfectly. All I had to do was insert a flash drive, wait for the workflow to finish, remove the drive, and insert another one – 100 times.
Here are the steps:
- Go to File > Save As Plug-in.
- Choose Folder Action from the pop-up menu.
- In the Attach to Folder pop-up, select Other…
- In the resultant open dialog, hit cmnd-shift-g. This will bring up a small sheet labeled Go to the folder:.
- In this sheet, type
/Volumes/, and hit the Go button, then hit Open. - Hit the Save button in the Plug-in sheet.
With this trick, any mounted device will trigger the attached workflow. What that workflow does is up to you, but the possibilities are endless.
Hi All. I’m bumping this months later because for whatever reason, iPhoto no longer sees my CF cards when I mount them and automatically starts importing my pictures, but the Finder still sees it just fine. So I’m trying to create a simple action to essentially re-create this previous behavior. (FWIW, it stopped working upon a hard drive failure and subsequent fresh install of Leopard on a new hard drive.) This tip is very helpful and gets me much of the way there, but I’m hoping there’s some way to essentially only run the workflow/action when my CF cards are mounted, not when any device is mounted. I am, by the way, completely new to Automator, so any mind-expanding ideas, however obvious to the initiated, are welcome! Thanks for the help!
Comment by Joel — April 28, 2008 @ 12:42 am
I was just wondering, as you mentioned in the last line any connected device would trigger this workflow, is it possible to narrow it down to a particular drive based on the drive name/label because i want to use this workflow to copy files to a USB hard drive and it shouldn’t happen when i plugin a USB memory stick!
Comment by bala — February 1, 2008 @ 2:45 pm
Thanks alot! by the wayyou cant put the plug-in in the ipod it has to be in ‘/Volumes/’
cheers! bo
Comment by robert huttinger — October 11, 2007 @ 9:30 am
I’m looking for a way to simply mount external hard drives on another computer on a network. Is there an automator script that will activate the “GO” Finder command?
Comment by Mac Carter — July 29, 2007 @ 9:22 am
T. Payton, I have similar problem too! Do you have any ideas for now?
Comment by iMax — July 6, 2007 @ 8:14 am