Hi @ETBrain! 

It’s not really possible to pause a Zap in that way. You could use a Delay by Zapier action to delay the rest of the actions in the Zap from running for a set amount of time. But if the file hasn’t been created after that time then you’d need to delay the Zap again so this might not be the ideal approach.

What you could do is split the workflow up. For example where you’d want to pause the Zap you would add a record of the necessary information created in a Google Sheets spreadsheet using a Create Spreadsheet Row action. Then you’d set up another Zap that uses the New or Updated Spreadsheet Row trigger. That trigger can be set to look for changes in a specific column, so you could have a column that you mark once the photoshop file is created.

That second Zap would need to use a Filter by Zapier action to determine whether the Zap should continue based on the value that’s in the “File Created” column. Then you’d have the subsequent actions that you want to have carried out and they’ll use the relevant information that was recorded in the Google Sheet row. 

Do you think that approach could work?

Thanks @SamB

It could certainly be part of the solution.  It relies on another manual step (marking a specific column once the photoshop file is created) and I’d rather avoid that if possible as there may be several files and corresponding zaps running at the same time.

I wondered about using the “new file in folder” as a trigger for the second zap but there’s potentially thousands of files being saved in the project folder and I imagine that would overwhelm the zap?

@ETBrain I think you are correct in that it would overwhelm the Zap, here is some more information on that. If you have any questions, feel free to pop back over and we can see what we can do, or locate the correct resource to accomplish your Zap goals. 

Hi Chanelle - thanks for confirming.

How about this solution:

• I add a delay of say 1 minute to give me time to create the image in photoshop and save it.

• The next step then searches for the image and if it’s there, performs the next action.

• If it’s not there, it waits another minute

etc.. up to say 10 minutes before stopping.

Is that possible?  If so, is there a way to loop back a finite number of times until the file appears?  I can think of a crude linear way of doing it with multiple delays and filters but is there a more elegant way? 

@ETA Data Hmm, it may work. But it would have to consist of multiple delays and filters as you suggested. I’d also suggest taking a look at Looping by Zapier, as this may come into play with what you are trying to accomplish! Give it a shot and let me know how it plays out, happy to come back to the drawing board!