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Folder Watching

Adding Folders

Switch to Folders in the sidebar and click Add Folder. Choose a directory for Distill to watch. New files in this folder are detected automatically.

If Distill cannot watch a folder — for example because access was denied under System Settings → Privacy & Security — a yellow warning icon appears next to the affected folder in the list. Clicking it opens the folder picker: select the same folder again to grant Distill access.

Processing Existing Files

If the folder already contains files that Distill has not renamed yet, Distill asks right after adding it whether to process them now. The same dialog lets you turn on Auto-Rename for the folder. With New Files Only the existing files stay as they are, and Distill only takes care of files that arrive from now on. With Distill Cloud, each processed file uses one AI credit — the dialog shows your current balance.

The … menu at the end of each folder row offers Process Existing Files at any time — for example after you turned on Auto-Rename later. Distill hands over every file that is not in the history yet: to the queue with Auto-Rename, otherwise as suggestions in the Files tab. The same menu opens the folder in Finder or stops watching it with Remove Folder; the files themselves stay untouched. Only files directly in the folder are processed, not those in subfolders.

Queue and Progress

What happens to detected files depends on the folder's Auto-Rename setting. Without Auto-Rename, Distill switches to the Files tab and adds the detected files there as rename suggestions — you review and confirm them just as after a drag & drop. With Auto-Rename, new files go into a queue and are processed automatically in the background.

While the queue is working, the Folders tab shows an overview below the folder list:

  • Detected, Processed and Remaining with a progress bar — how far the current run has got
  • Renamed, Failed and, where applicable, Skipped (files already renamed, or whose name already fit)
  • the file currently being analyzed, with how long it has taken so far; if a file takes unusually long, the time turns orange

That is also where you pause and resume processing. Once the queue is empty, the overview shows Processing complete with the result until the next run starts or you dismiss it. Failed files can be expanded: Distill names the reason for each file, can show it in Finder, and queues it again with Try Again. The status bar at the bottom of the window also shows the state of automatic processing; clicking it opens the Folders tab.

Auto-Rename

When Auto-Rename is enabled for a folder, new files are automatically analyzed and renamed without manual confirmation. Renaming uses the currently configured rules and the active AI provider.

Auto-rename is especially useful for scan folders or download directories where new documents arrive regularly.

Distill reports the result via system notification — once per run, not for every file: for a single file it shows the old and new name, otherwise the number of renamed and failed files. macOS asks for notification permission on first launch.

Edge case: same name, different file. Distill remembers every rename in its history and skips files already listed there — this keeps an already named file from being sent to the AI again on every folder event. If you later drop a different file under the old name into the same folder, the same protection applies: Distill takes it for the one it already handled and leaves it alone.

In that case, delete the matching entry from the history — the file is then processed normally again. Via the REST API that is DELETE /v1/history/{id}.

Settings Are Kept

Distill stores watched folders, history and templates in a database of its own and additionally keeps a backup of the folder list in the app settings. If the database is ever lost, Distill sets up the watched folders again from this backup on the next launch.