Alternative to "To Import" folder symlinking

Hey,

I’m having some issues with ScanSnap as it complains about the file path being too long (I guess theres a bug in that software that it doesn’t check the full path length before setting it’s auto generated file name — which I’d like to keep). I keep my EagleFiler library (and the To Import folder) in iCloud Drive so the path is already pretty long by default (~/Library/Mobile Documents/…) which is probably what’s causing that problem in the first place.

I read in this thread that there’s a way to link the “To Import” folder with a symlink but in this case that doesn’t work as ScanSnap resolves the path and it’s the same issue again.

Is there another way I could achieve that or should I use another software like Hazel to just move documents from ~/Incoming Scans to the iCloud Drive To Import folder that’s watched by Eagle Filer?

Ideally I’d be able to just move the “To Import” folder anywhere and tell Eagle Filer to use that but I haven’t seen a way to do that in the documentation.

Thank you!

That should work. The key would be to make the actual folder near the top of your home folder so that it has a short path. ScanSnap would reference this—it would not be resolving any symlinks. Then replace the To Import folder in your EagleFiler library folder with a symlink.

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Thanks, I thought ScanSnap is resolving it as the iCloud Drive path was shown in ScanSnap when I selected the linked location.

There’s one mistake I made though and that’s assuming that a macOS Alias is the same as a symlink which is not the case. That’s probably the reason why that didn’t work and it resolved the link. I now went ahead and just moved my EagleFiler library to my local Documents directory instead of iCloud Drive and everything works. I didn’t test it with a real symlink now as everything is currently working but I’ll update this post if I do.

Maybe this is already helpful for future readers, for me the problem is currently resolved - just not in the originally thought way.

Thanks again for your help!

You should be selecting the folder that’s not in iCloud Drive. Then there will not even be a link as far as ScanSnap is concerned. EagleFiler will be what’s following the link.

Currently, EagleFiler does not follow aliases for the To Import folder, but that’s not why it didn’t work before. The type of link won’t matter to ScanSnap if you give it the actual folder.