How to set automator (mac) to create folders and fill them with x number of files?

Question

I have seen several variations of this question asked however none of witch fully answer my problem. I have several folders that contain between 2,000 and 150,000 image files. Searching these directories becomes very inefficient as the number of files increases as speed is drastically decreased.

What I want to do is use automator to: 1. select folder 2. create subfolder 3. fill newly created subfolder with the first 1000 files in the folder selected in (1.) 4. if more files exist in the outer folder, create another subfolder and fill with the next 1000 files etc.

Is this possible? Any help is much apreciated.

Thank you, Brenden

Answer 1

This takes a directory and moves the contents to new folders called "newFolder1", "newFolder2" etc.

Have you used Terminal much? Let me know if you need more instruction. I also haven't put in any checks, so let me know if you get any errors.

o Save this file to your desktop (as script.sh for the purpose of tutorial)

#!/bin/bash

cd "$1"                   #Change directory to the folder to sort
filesPerFolder=$2       #This is how many files will be in each folder

currentDir='newFolder1';
currentFileCount=0;
currentDirCount=1;

mkdir $currentDir;
 
for file in *
do
 if [ -f "$file" ]
  then
   mv "$file" "$currentDir";
 fi 
 currentFileCount=$(($currentFileCount + 1));
 if [ $(($currentFileCount % $filesPerFolder)) -eq "0" ]   #Every X files, make a new folder
  then
   currentDirCount=$(($currentDirCount + 1));
   currentDir='newFolder'$currentDirCount;
   mkdir "$currentDir";
 fi
done

o Open Terminal and type cd ~/Desktop/

o Type chmod 777 script.sh to change the permissions on the file

o Type ./script.sh "/path/to/folder/you/want/to/sort" 30

o The 30 here is how many files you want in each folder.