Test post from the 14" M3 MBP. I already know I have a problem with my Automator application that handles the photo export.

I decided to try something different in order to make the switch between the iMac and the MBP easier. I set applications to close windows when quitting. I'm using iCloud for my Documents folder on both the iMac and MBP. The iMac has "Optimize Storage" turned on, since it only has a 1TB SSD. The MBP has a 2TB SSD, so I'm not turning that on.

Prior to this, I'd had the Marmot TBX located outside of Documents on the iMac, along with the Nice Marmot Exports folder (which gets sync'ed to the server). These folders were automatically sync'ed to a 64GB thumb drive (far larger than necessary). The idea was I'd just pull the thumb drive and plug it into the MBP and then mirror the same setup here.

Then I thought I'd just try and used Documents in iCloud as it's kind of intended to be used.

So I got all my scripts and automation set up over here and tried to post a photo from Photos to the marmot. The Photos to TBX part works, but the actual image export to the Images folder in the 2024 archive failed, because the file path is obviously different now that I'm using iCloud instead of a dedicated folder outside of Documents.

I've been futzing with trying to get that portion of the Automator application working. It requires running a little AppleScript that moves the image from the one place that you can use Automator to export from Photos to (a new folder each time in your Pictures folder in your User directory).

Apparently there's some secret incantation to get AppleScript to talk to a Documents folder in iCloud.

Why can't anything be easy? Isn't it Apple's job to simply abstract all these details away? Shouldn't a folder just be a folder, whether it's in iCloud or on my SSD? One of the reasons why I sometimes don't enjoy trying to automate things, "program" my computer.

Anyway, I'm taking a break from scratching my head about that and this is to just see if the vanilla export and sync works.

Keep your fingers crossed. 🤞