Using Automator to create sequential folders

First off, using / in folder names isn't a good idea, since this is a directory delimiter in UNIX and may cause other problems.

That said, working this kind of logic into Automator is, mostly easy, the issue is parsing the folder names to find the last-used digit (Automator doesn't do this well, IMHO.

You can use a series of Automator Actions to:

Get Specified Finder Items (get your base directory)

Set Value of Variable (store this value in a variable for re-use)

Get Folder Contents (find all the items in it)

Filter Finder Items (filter out the directories)

Sort Finder Items (sort them)

and now you'll have a list of the subfolders. The tricky part (in Automator) is then iterating through those, extracting part of the file name to find the last-used number.

So that's where I'd just use a Run AppleScript Action with something like:

on run {input, parameters}

tell application "Finder"

set n to name of last item of input

set {od, my text item delimiters} to {my text item delimiters, "/"}

set thelastDigit to last text item of n

set my text item delimiters to od

return thelastDigit + 1

end tell

end run

This script takes the last item in the list (which was sorted by name), extracts the last element (note the above caveat of using '/' in file names) and returns the next-highest number

You should then:

Set Value of Variable (store this number in a variable for re-use)

New Folder (create a new folder using the variables you created in earlier steps to define the folder name ( e.g. "PathTo-<Today's Date>-<NewFolderNumber>" and the location where to create it (from step 2).

(note that in the above, the bold text indicates the name of the actions to apply)

Hope that helps.

You might have a look at the following workflow, which I came up with using the ancient Tiger OS's version of Automator. With this approach, it's assumed that you have an existing destination folder into which the new subfolders will be deposited. In this example I created a folder on my desktop and named it "Destination Folder."

Once the workflow is saved as a Finder Plug-in (in later versions of Automator, I believe you would create a Service), the actions are initiated after right-clicking on the desired file(s) and selecting the workflow from a contextual menu. The files are then copied to a new subfolder inside the Destination Folder, the new subfolder now complete with the current date and a unique sequential number. Note that the Rename Finder Items action is used twice, once to get the correct current date (so the workflow can be used tomorrow and beyond), and a second time to add the sequential number. Hope this helps; Good luck.