Mac Automation Made Simple Video Podcast > Creating Drop Scripts in AppleScript

Episode 28
Date: 12.29.2009
Duration: 00:07:49
Creating Drop Scripts in AppleScript
In this episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie discusses how to drop scripts in AppleScript. Learn how to write a simple image processing AppleScript application that processes dropped files and folders..
[View in iTunes...] [View at Peachpit.com...]

Peachpit Blog Post > Automator Services: Merge Selected PDFs

12.10.09 - Automator Services: Merge Selected PDFs.

Today's Automator Service workflow tip involves something that I do fairly frequently, merging multiple PDF files together. Fortunately, with Automator Service workflows in Snow Leopard, this is now much easier for me than it used to be. [Read more at Peachpit.com...]

Peachpit Blog Post > Automator Services: Apply Filter to Selected Images

12.09.09 - Automator Services: Apply Filter to Selected Images.

If you’ve used Automator before, then you may know that it includes actions for performing basic image manipulation tasks, such as cropping and resizing. Today’s workflow uses one of these built-in actions to apply a filter to selected image files in the Mac OS X Finder. [Read more at Peachpit.com...]

Peachpit Blog Post > Automator Services: Merge Selected Images as PDF

12.08.09 - Automator Services: Merge Selected Images as PDF.

Today's Automator Service workflow tip involves image files. This workflow will receive selected image files in the Finder, and merge them together to form a multi-page PDF document. [Read more at Peachpit.com...]

MacTech AppleScript Essentials Column > Performing Basic Image Manipulation… Using Your Existing Software

March, 2005 - Performing Basic Image Manipulation... Using Your Existing Software.

This month, we're going to talk about performing some basic image manipulations with AppleScript. With the onset of the digital camera revolution comes a new set of problems for the computer user. The first thing many people realize after purchasing a digital camera is that film is essentially free, as is developing. You can take as many pictures as you like, just as long as you have ample hard drive space to store them.

While this concept seems amazing at first, you quickly realize that you now have thousands and thousands of image files to deal with. Those image files need to be downloaded, imported, renamed, filed, rotated, cropped, converted to other formats, and more! Sure, there are some tools that Apple gives us to help with these tasks, such as Image Capture and iPhoto. There are also a slew of other applications that you can download or purchase to aid with processing. However, wouldn't it be great if you could slap a few lines of code together to write your own application in order to help with your unique process? Well, using AppleScript, you can.

AppleScript is the perfect tool for automating many image-related tasks. As we have discussed in previous articles, AppleScript can be used to batch-rename files and folders. So, you could create a script that downloads your digital images into a custom folder structure and renames the images with the current date. You could create a script that opens up a folder of images in something like Photoshop and adds copyright information into the images' metadata. The possibilities are virtually limitless.

For this particular article, we're going to focus on performing some basic image manipulations, such as cropping, rotating, and resizing. We'll also look at ways you can convert your images to other formats, such as from JPEG to TIFF, and vice versa. Since AppleScript alone cannot manipulate images, you may be asking how will we do this? Using a background application named Image Events, which comes installed with Mac OS X, version 10.3 and higher, we can perform these tasks. [Read more at MacTech.com...]

MacTech AppleScript Essentials Column > Becoming More Efficient Through Folder Watching

October 2004 - Becoming More Efficient Through Folder Watching.

For the past several months, we have explored various aspects of AppleScripting in Mac OS X. We have discussed some basic Finder scripting, adding repeat loops and if/then statements to our scripts, and more. This month, we will explore a topic of frequent interest to those who want to automate various aspects of their workflow - folder watching. [Read more at MacTech.com...]