Help with my first combination of actions

Configuration Help & General Discussion
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1

I'm new to BTT (and any real kind of automation) and I am a professional photographer. I'm moving all of my archives away from Apple Aperture and to a combination of Photo Mechanic Plus for cataloging & Capture One Pro 12 for pictures that need any serious editing. My goal is to automate enough repetitive tasks that I can make up for the time I will lose using two apps vs one before.

This is something that I worked on yesterday, with a button on the touchbar, it takes the selected files from Photo Mechanic and copies them to a specific folder on my desktop, then it opens Capture One, which imports the files and opens a new window with those pictures. This works to a degree, and that is based on how many pictures there are to copy and what delays I use.

I have two questions that I know about right now:

  1. is there a way to have the completion of the action trigger the next action rather than trying to guess the delays needed to avoid breaking the workflow?

  2. is there a way to extend the workflow to then delete the copied files because at that point they would be in Capture One, and i don't want to have to keep manually deleting these files before i run the next batch.

i understand if this is beyond the scope of BTT, but any help or pointers to another app that might then be controlled by BTT would be much appreciated.

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Unfortunately I'm a total photography newbie and don't know Photo Mechanic Plus and Capture One Pro 12 (yet).

To your first question: Unfortunately that's not possible. Only the apps that execute an action know when the action has finished, and unless they notify other apps like BTT (which they probably don't) there is no way to know when an action is done.

Second question: Probably in a similar way as the first part of the script (switch back to Photo Mechanic Pro, then make it hit the delete button). Maybe there is a way to "cut" the files instead of copying them?

In many cases recording workflows with the Apple Automator app (or manual Apple Scripts) can also work really well, but the apps need to have decent Apple Script support for that. BTT can then trigger the Automator workflow or Apple Script.

Maybe there is somebody on this forum who has more experience with automating these apps.

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ok thank you