Automator: The Introduction
Posted October 11th, 2006 - 12:20 AM by Cujo || Organized in Utilities
Mac OSX comes with a very useful utility by the name of Automator. With this utility you are able to create workflows which will ease the process of repetitive tasks. The default Automator setup comes complete with the ability to create workflows for the majority of built-in applications and utilities of OSX.
When you start Automator for the first time you will see a listing of currently available applications in the left menu followed by available actions in the right menu. The window directly below these two menus will give you information on what the current selected action will do before you drag it into the workflow window. The workflow window is the large blank area on the right, this is where you will build your workflow by dragging any number of actions.
As an example, in the above screenshot I selected the Preview application and dragged the Rotate Images action into the workflow window. From there I am able to select different options for the action and each action will have its own unique set of options for it. You then save your action for later use. I generally save my actions that I use most frequently to the desktop so they are readily available any time that I need them.
The Automator can become a very powerful tool which can aid in the workflow process of any number of applications. I currently use it to resize, watermark and save into a new folder any number of photos from a photoshoot that I wish to upload to my photo gallery on my blog site. This is done simply by dragging the folder of pictures I wish to render onto my saved action on the desktop and Automator takes care of everything else. I will be posting later in the week how to accomplish this task in Automator as a separte Action Pack is needed to perform the operations.
Action Packs are additional actions that may be downloaded from Apple’s web site which allow workflows to be created for separte applications and utilities not in the default action packs that Automator has.
If you would like me to cover any additional Automator actions let me know and I’ll try to research and document how to perform the task in future posts.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:57 pm
[...] I recently discussed and gave an introduction to Automator a built-in workflow utility on Mac OSX. In this post I will demonstrate the steps I use to resize any number of images using Automator and Photoshop CS2, I will provide appropriate links to download the packages needed as well as provide my workflow as a download so that you can modify it to fit your own needs. [...]
May 31st, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I want to do a series of image sizes from the main. How do i get it to continue after the first render? Currently I’m getting an error that I need an open command — even with passing the files on checked in the render action.
I’m currently using v3.5 of the action pack