Restricting to Desktop

Question

I am attempting to do a simple Desktop cleanup action in Automator, but am having a problem.
I have a number of .jpg files directly on the Desktop and a number of Folders on the Desktop with .jpg files in them.
When I tell Automator to Find Finder Items in the Desktop, it will only find the .jpgs inside the Folders on the Desktop. Anything directly on the Desktop is completely ignored.
No other location has this problem. Am I doing something wrong or is this just the way it works?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Woah slow down. Just because one particular action uses spotlight doesn't mean you should drop the whole thing! I'm pretty sure that's your problem, but as I mentioned there are other ways to get a list of jpg's. The easiest one would be to use terminal's "find" command (which does not use spotlight), but you could also do it with apple script reasonably easy. Find is much faster.
Here's how you'd use find:
run shell script action with:
find ~/Desktop -name *.jpg
as the command (and /bin/bash as the shell)
run applescript action with:
on run {input, parameters}
set output to {}
repeat with unixPath in input
set end of output to POSIX file unixPath
end repeat
return output
end run
as the code (converts unix paths to file objects), and then add whatever you want to the end. The result is files and folders, I tested it with the same set labels action used above.
PS: sorry for any typo's, I'm gonna be late for work so I didn't proofread.