Using applescript to move files whose names appear in an excel spreadsheet - excel

Question

I have a folder with about 4000 image files. I need to select some of those files, based on whether their names appear in an excel spreadsheet, and copy them to a new folder. If possible, I would also like to tag them with a color tag so I know which files in the original folder were moved and which were not. I got the code below from here.
tell application "Microsoft Excel"
tell worksheet 1 of active workbook
set fileList to value of used range
end tell
end tell
set rootFolder to "path/to/sourcefolder" as POSIX file
set filesToMove to {}
repeat with thisItem in fileList
try
set end of filesToMove to alias (rootFolder & thisItem)
on error
display dialog "File " & thisItem & " is not in the folder"
end try
end repeat
tell application "Finder"
move filesToMove to folder "path/to/destination" as POSIX file
end tell
When I run it, it's unable to find any of the files. I think the issue might have to do with using / in my file path instead of : but I don't know how to set a path to an external drive with the applescript syntax. Using the same variable declaration, set rootFolder to "path/to/sourcefolder" as POSIX file, and then telling finder to open rootFolder works fine.
I also need the script to have more flexibility - not all files have the same naming conventions, and so I need it to search for any files whose names contain the identifiers from the spreadsheet, but may not match it exactly. I.E. the spreadsheet entry may be "00103", but the file name is "PX00103KL.jpg."
In the meantime, I've created an automator workflow that moves and tags the files exactly the way I want, but only after I manually enter the search string. If I could combine those two ideas, of iterating through the spreadsheet entries in excel and using each in turn as input for the automator workflow, that would be ideal.
Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

I don't have Excel, but assuming that you can get a list of strings from it, here is a bit of code that will find all files in a target folder that contain the string(s), set a label to it and then copy it. Change appropriately.
It uses the unix command line tool for spotlight, mdlist to find the files. Trying to do it purely in applescript seems to be painful. The shell command when stitched together is something like this:
mdfind -onlyin ~/Documents/ "kMDItemDisplayName == '*somestring*'"
Here is the code:
set stringList to {"144", "g_"}
set rootFolder to "/Users/blah/Downloads/" as POSIX file
set destFolder to "/Users/blah/Downloads/test" as POSIX file
set filesToMove to {}
set mdAtr to "\"kMDItemDisplayName == '*"
repeat with thisItem in stringList
set sPath to quoted form of POSIX path of rootFolder
set sName to mdAtr & thisItem & "*'\""
set sCmd to "mdfind -onlyin " & sPath & " " & sName
set sResults to (do shell script sCmd)
set fList to (every paragraph of sResults) as list
repeat with i in fList
set f to (POSIX file i) as alias
tell application "Finder"
set label index of f to 3
#copy file f to folder (destFolder as alias)
end tell
end repeat
end repeat