For me, Hazel is a great app—a kind of unsung hero of automation. It just chugs along in the background taking care of busy work for me and making me forget it’s even there. (“It” meaning both the app and the busy work.) My most robust use case for it is sorting the bureaucracy of life: bills, statements, and other PDFs I seem to steadily accumulate, which it renames based on file content and then moves to DEVONthink. Hat tip to the MacSparky Field Guide for Hazel, which helped me to these automations up and running a few years back.
I teach at a university and need to download a lot of student paper submissions from the Canvas LMS. I update a set of Hazel rules each semester and then I use it all semester long to rename student assignment submissions to a file name of assignment-student name, which is preferable to the long file name Canvas assigns it or the generic ones students often use (“paper d1”). A small thing, but when dealing with hundreds of documents over a semester, it’s really useful.
One thing I’ve been meaning to do is to create a rule to simply rename a file with the document title, which is often the first line of a document, but not always. I often read journal articles and other texts where the file names aren’t helpful at all. I know there is a metadata property called “Title,” but that is often empty or has text that doesn’t correspond to the title. One for the to do list.
In any case, I’d also like to know what others are using it for.