My favorite little automation

I take a lot of screenshots in meetings. Inspiration, references, a detail from someone’s screen I want to remember. For years they all landed in one folder with names like “Screenshot 2026-11-12 at 10.41.07,” and finding one later meant scrolling.

Now each screenshot files itself. My automation checks my calendar, sees which meeting I was in when I took it, and moves it to a folder for that topic. It took about five minutes to set up, and it’s one of my favorite small tools.

What it does

Recurring meetings get their own folder. Every screenshot from the weekly design review goes to the same folder, week after week.

One-off meetings join their project. If a meeting isn’t recurring but covers a topic I’ve met about before, it detects that and files the screenshot with that project.

Everything else stays put. Screenshots I take outside a meeting stay in the main folder, so that folder is short and easy to scan.

The result is that my screenshots folder stays clean, and I can find a reference by remembering the meeting instead of the date.

Build your own

You don’t need to write any code. Copy the prompt below into Claude Code, or into the Claude app with access to your Mac, and Claude builds it with you. It takes about five minutes.

Build me an automation on my Mac that sorts my screenshots by the meeting I took them in.

1. Set my Mac to save screenshots to ~/Screenshots.
2. Watch that folder in the background (use launchd with WatchPaths) and run a script on every new screenshot.
3. Find the calendar event that was happening when the screenshot was taken. Use my Google Calendar (help me connect it) or Apple Calendar. Skip all-day events and events I declined.
4. Pick a folder inside ~/Screenshots/Meetings:
   - Recurring meeting: one folder per series, so every week's screenshots land together.
   - One-off meeting: compare its title with my existing folders. If it's the same project, use that folder. If not, make a new folder named after the meeting.
5. Rename the file with the date and meeting name, like "2026-11-12 Design review.png".
6. If no meeting was happening, leave the screenshot where it is.
7. Log every move so I can check it, then take a test screenshot with me before you finish.

Or download the free skill, add it to Claude, and say “set up my screenshot sorter.” The skill walks Claude through each step and checks that it works.

What Claude sets up

1. Send screenshots to one folder. In the Screenshot app (Shift-Command-5), choose Options, then Other Location, and pick a folder like ~/Screenshots.
2. Watch the folder. A small script runs whenever a new file appears. On a Mac, launchd can do this with a WatchPaths setting, or you can use Folder Actions or an app like Hazel.
3. Look up the meeting. The script reads the file’s creation time and asks the calendar what was happening then. With Google Calendar, that’s one call to the Calendar API for events around that time. For Apple Calendar, a command-line tool like icalBuddy works. Skip all-day events and anything I declined.
4. Find the right folder. If the event is recurring, Google Calendar gives every instance the same recurringEventId, so the script uses that series to pick a folder. If it’s a one-off, the script compares the meeting title with the existing project folders. A simple version matches keywords. A smarter one asks an AI model which folder fits, or whether it needs a new one.
5. Move and rename it. The file moves to that folder with a name that includes the date and the meeting, like 2026-11-12 Design review.png, so it’s searchable later.

If no meeting matches, the script does nothing, which is why the main folder stays clean.

What’s next

Next I want the screenshots to land in the same Google Drive folder as the meeting notes. Google Meet can save notes to Drive and attach them to the calendar event, so the script could read the event’s attachments, find the notes’ folder, and put the screenshots beside them. Google Drive for desktop syncs Drive folders to the Mac, so moving a file into the right local folder would be enough.

Then everything from a meeting would live in one place: what we said and what we looked at.