Rules Precedence
All the rules that you create are processed in a specific order, designed to allow you to create more specific rules that will “outrank” other, less-preferred rules.
When you run an Organize Operation on your repository, all of the rules contained within the repository will be processed in the following order:
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Rules in the most deeply-nested folders will be run first.
Any rules that you define in nested folders will be run before rules defined in their parents. For example, rules defined in C:\Repository\Photos will be run before rules defined in C:\Repository
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Rules that have more variables override rules that have less variables.
This applies to types of rules such as Move Rules that can contain variables within them.
Rules with a larger number of variables contained within them have a higher priority than rules with a lesser number of variables.
For example, if you wanted to sort photos by their year and type of camera that was used to take them, you might create a Move Rule with the following destination:
{RepoBase}\Organized\{CreateYear}\{CameraModel}
That rule will only be run if all of the variables are available for the file that is being moved (see the next rule).
You could have a ‘fallback rule’ such as the following:
{RepoBase}\Organized\{CreateYear}\UnknownCamera
This has a lower priority because it only has two variables, as opposed to the three in the first rule.
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Rules containing variables that can not be resolved will be ignored.
As mentioned above, if a rule has any variable in it that cannot be resolved while attempting to process it (such as a reference to a Metadata field that is not available for the file), then the rule is simply disregarded for that file.
That file will then be available to any lower-priority rules. This makes it easy to craft your rules in such a way that you can take advantage of files with more Metadata associated with them, while still allowing you to organize files with less Metadata associated with them.