Aperture Hot Folder troubleshooting November 5th

One of the more useful utilities for Apple’s Aperture (apart from FlickrExport of course) is an Automator AppleScript called Aperture Hot Folder.

I’ve used this thing on 3 machines without a problem. Today, however, when I installed it on my MacBook Pro, it seemingly refused to accept my selection of a folder to watch with a weird error message.

Removing preferences, caching, re-downloading the script, even rebooting didn’t help. The offered “Edit” button led nowhere either. Digging around in the downloaded package’s raw AppleScript files revealed something that drew my attention.

set the folder_action_folder to \
  (path to Folder Action scripts folder from user domain)

The default location for this user-centric folder containing the “Folder Action” scripts is the directory ~/Library/Scripts. And — ta-dah — this folder was read-only for my user for some reason. Maybe an installer I ran created that folder after obtaining administrative permissions, what do I know. Now Aperture Hot Folder happily does its job.