I never use my Downloads folder. It’s a fusion drive, so it’s precious, fast, and expensive. I don’t need a thousand downloaded copies of Xcode and firmware updates littering its limited space. Instead, I point all my browsers and other apps to download to my secondary data disk.

And before you ask, I use numerical and alphabetic prefixes so everything shows up in the right place and the right order for quick reference and single-letter typing access. Whatever data I can offload from my main drive, I do offload:

However, when it comes to airdropping, it’s generally true that whatever I’m sending back and forth is of immediate interest. In such case, I don’t want it heading into my Downloads folder. I want it on my desktop as soon as it lands. As  I’m updating my Playgrounds Book right now, I’m doing a lot more airdropping than I normally would.

I’m not a big user of smart folders and Automator actions. I have a smallish bunch that I occasionally use. Still, they have their place and today was a perfect occasion to bring a new one into the mix.

I just had had it with the Downloads folder and decided to build a bouncer that would automatically throw any item added to ~/Downloads up to the desktop. I thought I’d share how to do this.

Step 1. Create a new Folder Action

Step 2. Choose the Downloads folder.

Step 3. Drag “Move Finder Items” onto “Drag actions or files here to build your workflow”

This creates the following action, with Desktop selected by default. (If it’s not, choose Desktop for the destination.)

Step 4. Then save:

Your new automator action is stored in ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Folder\ Actions:

Step 5. Test. Drop a file into Downloads and confirm that it moves to the desktop. You should now be ready to airdrop to your desktop.

Note: I’m sure there’s a better way to do this, but I actually wrote an app that quickly opens AirDrop windows on the Mac side of things. I found an appropriate AppleScript online, compiled it to an app, and use Spotlight to launch it. Very handy when I’m more focused on iOS than OS X at the moment.