TUAW Post > Preparing Blog Images with Automator

Automator's the perfect tool for streamlining some of the repetitive things you do on a daily basis. One thing it's great at is doing basic manipulation to lots of image files. Need to resize a bunch of images or convert them from one format to another? No problem, Automator is ready to help. In this post, you'll build an Automator workflow that prepares images for your blog by renaming them sequentially and then scaling them down in size. Don't have a blog? Well, this workflow could also be used for preparing images for insertion into a Word document, or to send in an email. Feel free to adjust to your specific needs.

[Read more on TUAW...]

Mac Productivity: Quick Scripts & Workflows – Scaling Images in the Finder

There are tons of apps that allow you to manipulate images on your Mac.  iPhoto and Preview are two from Apple, and there are lots more available from the Mac App Store and third-party software vendors.  What you may not know, however, is that you don’t need a third-party app to do some basic image manipulations with your existing operating system.  Using Automator, you can create your own custom image processing plug-ins, which you can run right within the Finder.  [Read more on the Peachpit blog...]

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...]

Mac Automation Made Simple Video Podcast > Creating an Image Processing Automator Workflow

Episode 1
Date: 07.29.2008
Duration: 00:07:09
Creating an Image Processing Automator Workflow
In this first episode of Mac Automation Made Simple, Ben Waldie demonstrates how to create a simple image processing workflow using Automator in Mac OS X Leopard. Learn how to create a workflow that manipulates images from directly within the Finder..
[View in iTunes...] [View at Peachpit.com...]

Apple.com Article > Rename, Convert, and Caption Images

For photographers, organizing and maintaining thousands of images can be quite a task. However, Automator can provide some relief. Use Automator to batch rename your digital images, convert them from one format to another, add copyright information, and more! Create a customized image workflow that’s right for you.

The following steps will walk you through the process of creating an Automator workflow that will run when image files are added into an input folder. This workflow will rename the images sequentially, along with the current date, convert them to TIFF format, and add copyright information using Photoshop. [Read more...] (pdf)

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...]